So You’ve Decided to Use a Visual Analytics Tool–What Now?

For audiences more familiar with the data, perhaps an analyst looking to make some business recommendations, you could make use of a series of charts with filters for them to dynamically adjust the displayed data. Think comparative measures, slicing data by different periods of time, or focusing on specific metrics. For these visualizations, a dedicated data visualization platform like Tableau or Power BI is recommended–they are designed to allow users to make these dynamic changes themselves.

For high-level audiences like CEOs or Finance Directors who have a detailed understanding of the underlying data, a focused key performance indicator dashboard is a great way to showcase the data in a way that allows for quick business decisions to be made. Think about building a few chart tiles to show the context of the data, then make the KPIs a centerpiece for executives who need to know the “top-level” information quickly and clearly. Power BI Dashboards (available on service only) are an excellent choice here. 

Vital Question 1: Who is the Audience?

Step 2: Choose your visual analytics tool

Now that you know your audience, how do you move from raw tables to visualizations? There’s no correct first step as everyone’s process is different, but the best starting advice is to jump right in! To start, it is important to match the type of visualization with the type of data available–line charts suit continuous data (think date and time data) best whilst bar charts work best with discrete data (think slicing key performance indicators by categorial data like product type). 

Of course, you could do all this work by hand, or even with the ever-ubiquitous software Microsoft Excel… however, there are dedicated platforms for data visualization that can do some of the heavy lifting for you, allowing you to generate your end results faster and more clearly. Industry-leading tools such as Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, and Amazon QuickSight all provide a way for you to enter your raw data and generate a powerful visualization for your users. We’re not going to push one specific path in this post–the best tool is the one you become most comfortable with through learning and experimenting. 

Create visualizations with your end goals in mind

We mentioned preattentive attributes above when discussing audiences. These are visual properties that viewers process without conscious thought–think about how you naturally view a highlighted color separately from the rest of a set, or easily group items by shape. Color, form (shape), movement (direction), and position are all powerful attributes to encode in your data to guide your audience to actionable insights.

Step 3: Guide your audience

Now that you have your audience and visualization(s) chosen, you can maximize the impact of your data with additional guidance. No matter the level of data literacy for your audience, visual cues are an effective way to direct your audience to the most important information on the screen.

Visual cues draw the user’s attention to the information on the page. Visual cues can be direct components of your visualizations, or they can play a supporting role while giving your visualizations the center stage. This can be done by adding a background to the page(s) that display your visualizations. 

Apart from making your reports visually appealing, a huge aspect of visual cues and visual flair is brand identity. Your report/content backgrounds can include your logo and company colors. Consistency in visual cues and flair throughout different content your company puts out becomes your brand identity and a second way for users to recognize your brand, apart from the quality of your work.

Streamlining Dashboards: Minimizing Chartjunk with Icon Design

Using visual analytics tools can evolve your data requirements and goals from a spreadsheet to a simple visualization, and from a simple visualization to more advanced visualizations with complex filtering and interactions. Ultimately, the best tool is the one you are comfortable with and accomplishes the specific goal at hand. Just remember to keep your end user in mind!

Thanks for reading,
Juan Carlos Guzman and Matt Snively