As clichéd as it may sound – “a picture is worth a thousand words” and it couldn't be more apt in
today’s world where we are constantly bombarded by information. There is an increased need to depict this information in a way that makes it easier to ‘get it’ without putting the onus of analyzing the data on the consumer.
Finance: Let’s talk money – Credit Card Spend Analyzer
“How did I end up racking up such a huge credit card bill” – we have all been there. Well, some organizations are now making an attempt to help you better analyze your spending patterns, see purchases by category and drill down to individual transactions within a category and sort them by any attribute such as transaction date, dollar value, etc.
Case in point, the Discover Spend Analyzer
I find this to be one of the better ways for showing credit card transactions.
What you see above is a combination of
- Pie-chart - used to depict the categories of the purchases for the selected period, which is one month in this case. In this example, you could immediately figure out that the major purchases for the selected period were supermarket and medical spending.
- Bar-chart - used to depict monthly spending for the current and the past months. Again, very easy to know that for the spends for the selected period is within the average spending whereas it was above average for the month of April.
- A great value-add is that line on the bar chart which depicts the average spend across all the months which immediately lets you figure out how much you are spending in a month. This lets you narrow down to those months where spends were way above average, drill down to those months to see why was that and then take corrective actions if required.
- You could also look at that pie chart over different time periods by selecting 1 month, 3 months, 24 months, etc.
Sports: Twitter Activity Analysis
This particular example would make Football fans really happy (I am talking about football which is played using your foot).
What you see below is an analysis of the twitter feed by the game being played, (for example, Germany versus Brazil) which includes:
- The top 10 hashtags that were trending over time during the game (the radius of the circle is directly proportional to how many times the hashtag was used)
- A line graph showing the total number of relevant tweets over time
- Location information from where these tweets originated superimposed on a map
This is a classic example where a ton of data has been represented in a single view. The biggest advantage of such representation is that it puts things in new perspective and lends new insight which otherwise would not have been possible my merely looking at the raw data. This is the power of visualization. The above dashboard was created using Tableau.
Retail: Sales Data Analysis
Let's look at leveraging dashboards and visualizations from a business perspective. Assume you are the CEO of a large consumer goods company and you want a bird's eye view of your business to ensure everything is fine and if anything needs special attention.
What you see above consists of three important business dashboards:
- The first dashboard gives you at-a-glance understanding of profitability, with views presented by geography, product category, and customer segment. Here you see bar charts sales information by customers and product category. The overall sales by locations is depicted by superimposing sales data onto a map where the radius of the circle is directly proportional to sales quantity.
- The second dashboard focuses on products - here the size of the squares represent quantity sold. For example, it is clear that for the month of Jan, Paper and Binders were sold the most. At the same time, the color of the box indicates profit or less. For example, in Jan, Art Supplies led to a loss of $360 in-spite sales of 1,183 units.
- The third on customers - here you see a scatter plot which immediately lets you see who are your most profitable customers as well as who aren't (intuitively colored red). The horizontal bar chart again depicts similar information in a different way.
Each visualization offers much deeper layers of information, allowing you, the CEO (or any executive for that matter) to identify specific problems and opportunities in minutes.
Using the filter panels on each dashboard enables you to further navigate the data with your own criteria, giving you greater control and flexibility. In short, you get to dive into the information that is important to you.
Final words....
All industries and applications are headed the visual way. The above examples are just a few of thousands out there that cement this fact. Not surprisingly, there is a huge demand for professionals that can understand the business and create these dashboards that cuts analysis time from days to minutes. Thus, enabling big businesses to individual customers make quick and informed decisions.
