Data visualization is one of the most important ways to create a data-driven business culture.
It benefits your employees by giving them the opportunity to access BI capabilities that will drive your business forward.
It benefits your customers by using your data to tell a compelling story through visualization. Reducing the risk of your viewers misinterpreting your data or being mislead.
Although data visualization may seem easy, there are 4 best practices you should keep in mind to make sure you are making the most impact.
It sounds simple right? However simple it seems knowing your audience is critical when you start visualizing your data. Visualizing your data is useless if it's not designed to communicate clearly with your audience. By understanding what your audience wants, your report becomes clearer, more relevant, and more importantly more memorable.
Ultimately, if you know your audience it makes the process of viewing and processing data much easier and quicker for them. If you don't consider your audience you will run the risk of creating an irrelevant report, wasting your time and money.
Defining a clear purpose provides the guidelines for making your report easier to read and understand. A purpose allows you to make your insights the focal point of the report, ensuring you answer the most vital questions, provide real value, and help solve the problems.
A purpose most importantly will make sure the finished report is useful, preventing wasted time.
Once you take the plunge into visualizing your data it can be really easy to get carried away with building lots of irrelevant visuals. Visual components should be used to represent the key insights that you want to bring attention to. To make your data easier to understand choose the right component to visualize the right insight, and try not to detract from the point by overusing components.
To see more information on which visual components to use check out the top 10 must-have Power BI visuals article.
Follow the same process for every report. Using the same methodology when collecting data, defining your purpose, and designing visuals ensure consistency and quality. It's also important to think about classifying your reports once they have been created. Classification makes it easier for you to define the different purposes of reports for reference in the future.
The Numerro toolkit helps you to focus on these best practices by taking away the pressure of design. This means you can spend your time identifying the most impactful insights you want to drive for your audience.
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