Post a neat little comment to Facebook or Twitter then post a photo or video. Watch the difference in the number of people that engage or share. According to MIT, the human brain can process and identify images in just 13 milliseconds. Written information can take many seconds for the brain to process. It is clear the future will need to be more visual. Anita Campbell, Publisher of Small Business Trends shares the following strategic insights…
Recently my team was debating whether to use a bar chart or a pie chart to illustrate sales data when a new employee asked why we were spending so much time on such a low value activity. “Why not just embed the spreadsheet?” she asked.
I was surprised and intrigued by the question, but the answer is simple: because a chart saves the viewer valuable time and energy by providing near instantaneous context and clarity.
Our challenge, like that of most businesses today, wasn’t in collecting and presenting data, but pulling meaning out of it. When done properly, data visualization solves this challenge because it takes advantage of the fact that human beings are visual creatures. A good chart packs more of a punch than a column of figures or a block of text. It persuades by isolating and highlighting a few bits of relevant data so the viewer isn’t overwhelmed with irrelevant detail that may obfuscate the point.
Today’s powerful software tools help us gain insights from data. We just have to use them wisely.
More Choices in Dashboards and Business Intelligence Software
Business dashboards excel at making data obtained through business intelligence software meaningful. With these tools, small business owners can get from data collection to understanding and insight faster, and with less manual effort.
The challenge for us as business owners is knowing how to use the computational power of these of tools to organize data into charts and graphs to help us, and our employees, extract meaning out of our company’s information. That’s where knowing some best practices around data visualization come in handy.
A good chart points out relationships between data points, such as by:
- showing the growth of numbers over time (bar chart),
- illustrating how big a part something is to the whole (pie chart), or
- forecasting the direction of things to come (trend line).
One of the charts we use in our business is a production time chart. Knowing how long it takes to produce our product (in this case content) helps us allocate writer and editor time. And it helps us project cash flow to know standard turnaround times and determine capacity to take on more work.
Here is a spreadsheet showing our actual turnaround times to produce five different types of content.
As you can see, you glean some information from the spreadsheet. But it’s hard to make sense of it and use it to make business decisions. That’s because there’s a lot of detail and it’s not presented well.
The average figure further confuses matters. If we were just to look at a raw unweighted average for all content types, we might assume it takes at least one week to turn around most of our content. However, that’s not true.
For some types of content, it takes just a day or two. Other types of content can take two weeks to turn around, because an interview has to be scheduled, transcribed and then written up (the “Founder interview” types of articles). In other cases, considerable research has to be conducted pushing times out further (the “Product choices list” types of articles).
Now, here’s the same data, but grouped and averaged by product type, and then presented in a bar chart so you can see it at a glance:
Doesn’t the bar chart make it much easier to tell instantly which types of articles have had the longest turnaround times?
And doesn’t it now become a simple matter to estimate standard delivery times and understand what’s a realistic expectation, now that we have a clear view of the right data?
That, you see, is the value of a good chart.