3 Tips to Do Great for Making Data Visualization Work Data journalist David McCandless had once stated in his TED talk, The Beauty of Data Visualization “When you're lost in information, an information map is kind of useful.” On a daily basis, we seem to be inundated with a steady constant flow of data making us not just up a creek without a paddle, but lost at sea. To avoid being lost, we need to have the right tools and appropriately use LexisNexis research solutions to filter out irrelevant data and make develop a meaning from the remainder. According to McCandless, data visualization is like a second language, the “language of the eyes”.
If used effectively, you can turn it out to be extremely useful, not just for wrangling insights from your news and business research, but also for making that information easier to absorb. When used in combination with what McCandless calls “language of the mind”—words, numbers and concepts—you can enhance understanding and detect patterns, trends and relationships that could impact your business. Doing Data Visualization Right When it comes to PowerPoint presentations, often they have been more as alternates of copy-filled slides with tiny, illegible graphs. While it’s no way the fault of the PowerPoint medium, but the effort made to try to explain complex concepts by intending to:
Go overboard with wordy explanations
Over-simplify to reduce information overload
Or do both at the same time
Doing so, we end up struggling to share meaningful insights, even when you have data visualization tools. The results are more like the science fair displays you’ve ‘helped’ your kids make than the critical business intelligence you’d like to present. Dan Maycock, from the Innovation & Digital Services group at Capgemini, states in a blog post that “… self-service BI can have very negative implications … you can easily find yourself building interesting charts without being able to articulate why those charts are impactful. “ Leveraging nexis research solutions tools can help overcome such issues. To ensure that we all get it right, here are a few tips for ensuring your data visualizations serve their intended purpose.
Get familiar with data modelling fundamentals. It is all about fundamentals- understanding the basics and then working along. Even with a built-in analytics visualizer to drill down through the data, the basic understanding of which type of visualization is most appropriate for the data set, or how to model the data effectively so the data tells an accurate story, appropriate usage of nexis research tool etc. cannot be undermined. Otherwise, you could be end up with unrealistic visualizations leading to something you would not want to base your business-critical decisions on.
Choose your data strategically. Focus on the data that is closely related to corporate goals, when it comes to conducting news and business research and analysing media sets to create data visualizations. Strategic usage if data prerequisites, defining the problem, exploring the data and optimally use LexisNexis business research solutions to create visualizations that identify the impact, outcome or solution.
Tailor your visualizations to your audience. Choose your data as per your audience. Do not go for a ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy, which is sure to fail. Such as, sales have different priorities than Product Development; the CFO has different data needs than the CMO. Taking cue from the aforementioned Ted Talk, David McCandless chooses his data specifically to offer up some pretty interesting data visualizations. For example, he used a simple arrangement of boxes to give context to reporting on the billions spent for different things. On his “Billion Dollar OGram”, he scaled the boxes to represent different spend levels. He added colour to help the audience quickly see the motivation behind the spending: purple is fighting; red is giving money away; green is profiteering. Even though the data visualization was simple, it still delivered the
‘wow’ factor. It is not just offering data to your audience to help make informed decisions, but also to make the presentation of data in such a manner that will make your audience go ‘wow’. Leverage nexis business research solutions to ensure that all the hard work made to track down the news and business information your company needs, are appropriately presented to your audience to achieve maximum insight and engagement to help make their decision in an informative manner.