Reading pages of dense tables is a drag, especially when you’re trying to identify insights or trends to make data-driven decisions.
Every business needs to measure performance and stay agile in implementing new strategies and improving response time, but when this data is buried or cumbersome to read, it works against you as your efficiency drops.
Data visualization is a critical tool for decision-makers across every business sector and size. Whether you’re a startup or a multi-national corporation, data visualization is essential in capturing key information, aiding decision-making, completing competitive analyses, budgeting, and drawing insights.
If you’ve hit a roadblock when it comes to creating data visualizations or making them work for your business without involving the IT department, it’s time for a new solution.
Why Use Data Visualizations?
Data visualizations can be complicated (or expensive) to create if you don’t have the right tools, tempting many business owners to forgo using them altogether, but there are plenty of reasons why you shouldn’t overlook this type of reporting.
Data visualizations offer businesses loads of benefits, such as:
- Providing at-a-glance snapshots of performance
- Measuring success or failure of your products or services against your benchmarks
- Enhancing your message when communicating with stakeholders
- Summarizing complex information so it’s easy to understand
- Highlighting trends, opportunities, challenges, and relationships between inputs and performance
With the right data visualizations, it’s easy to measure your performance in real-time. The result? Agility in the face of competitors.
Visual tools make your reports stand out in the viewer’s minds and helps solidify your message. They improve response time when you can quickly see what’s working for your business and what’s not, allowing you to change course or redirect your resources rapidly.
The Drawbacks of Data Visualizations
The benefits of using data visualizations are often overshadowed. Many BI solutions on the market offer hundreds of visualization options that overwhelm your data, rather than simplifying it.
In truth, your business can report all of your key data using a handful of core visualization types. The most common, and easiest to interpret, types of data visualization are:
Columns
Bar graphs
Pie charts
Line graphs
Area charts
Stacked bars
Treemaps
KPIs
Data and Pivot Tables
With this handful of basic data visualization types, your business can communicate all of the information that you need, without getting complicated.
While many people make the mistake of thinking that more is more when it comes to graph and chart options, this isn’t the case. Using the wrong type of data visualization tools comes with a variety of potential pitfalls, such as:
- Cluttered graphic elements that don’t add value to your underlying message
- Inaccurate or misleading representations of information that can lead to wrong conclusions and decisions
- Time wasted in both creating and interpreting unnecessarily complicated visuals
Where Business Intelligence Falls Short
BI “solutions” often create more problems than they solve. They are often misused because the team who is trying to generate your organization’s data visualizations doesn’t have the tech know-how to navigate complex software.
Some of the biggest issues that business users run into with using BI solutions are:
- Expensive software (that you continually pay via subscription-pricing)
- Lack of technical knowledge and relying heavily on IT resources
- Overly complicated software that is too specialized for the average user
DashboardFox Self-Service Business Intelligence Solution
If you’re fed up with complicated reports, convoluted information, and a lack of support in creating data visualizations, it’s time to change your BI tools.
Contrary to what you might think, a plethora of visualization types will not necessarily serve you better. Your business is best served by fewer, smarter options that provide the real solutions you need – without needing an IT background to get there.
At DashboardFox, we understand this better than anyone, which is why our BI tools are business-user-driven, not IT-driven, allowing you to easily consolidate your data and turn it into the visualization tools you need to make decisions.
DashboardFox is easy to use and integrate into your business. It’s self-serve and dynamic in nature, making it simple to change parameters without starting from scratch. This means your team can spend more time doing their jobs and less time generating reports and troubleshooting difficult software.
It’s also an affordable choice for businesses that want the benefits of data visualizations without the hefty price tag of over-the-top BI solutions. DashboardFox has an industry-unique no-subscription pricing model.
Changing the way you harness your data, create reports, and interpret results will transform the way your business operates and measures success. All this while supporting decision-makers and reducing the need for IT-heavy tools that don’t cut it for representing your business’ valuable data.
To see how DashboardFox can help you, please check out a demo or contact us to discuss your requirements.