Our brain is more likely to process-visualizations than it is to read text; the brain process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. That being said, infographics generate 30x times more traffic than normal text.

All these data visualization stats prove that using visualizations is extremely profitable for your business. It is one of the hottest tools for data-driven business management as everything relies on data.

What is Data Visualization

Data visualizations have completely changed the perspective of how a business operates as the marketing trends have transitioned from generic to extremely market-specific.

As business intelligence has become the core of companies’ toolkits and data practices, stimulating data visualizations are becoming more and more essential. Data plays a crucial role while taking various data-driven decisions, especially in a data-dependent environment.

If the data is lost, the companies will not have a foundation to base their decisions on, such decisions would be as useful as shooting in the dark without any direction. Therefore, data analysts, scientists, and other professionals ensure that they are working round the clock to secure every bit of data and present them as efficiently as they can.

However, even after implementing Business Intelligence and employing the best of the best, sometimes data visualizations can produce the opposite effect. Even though they are meant to streamline data analysis and stimulate comprehension, they can end up being ineffective.

A recent survey told that even though companies try their best to implement the most optimal strategies, a few of the data visualizations end up doing more harm than good. 

Regardless, data visualizations are here to stay, but we must discuss why these corporates are not getting what they desire out of it and how can they do better!

Why do some visualizations yield unsuccessful results?

According to a survey, only 4% of businesses extract successful results from data visualizations, all other companies reported that even though they are using appropriate techniques, the outcome is still unsatisfactory.

When the survey inquired about the efficiency of their overall data-driven decisions; 43% of the participants said that their strategies are successful, 53% are not sure of the strategies, and only 4% of them were confident that their strategies have never failed them.

To understand the situation better, there are many data visualization examples on the internet, out of which plenty of them have had a hundred percent efficiency, they have their data integration models including private dashboards.

All these examples have shown that in the current market, the dashboard system can help many organizations and IT companies, whose success rate with data visualizations was very low previously but to make full use of it, it should be customized to suit the standards of the organization.

However, companies who have used the dashboard had many shocking revelations, they said that the dashboard has not shown a massive difference in the effectiveness of the data visualizations. They said that it did not help them out at all.

One of the major issues here is that many companies do not have access to consistent data, which serves as a challenge. Therefore, they use dashboards, which provide them with information that is relevant to each individual in an easily digestible manner. But the dashboards can sometimes malfunction and become too congested, which results in losing or overlapping of important information.

One of the reasons for this is again, data inconsistency in both management and acquiring. Many companies lack the skills to provide steady data and some of them just don’t have the right amount of data, which is required to formulate a resourceful dashboard.

That is why it is not surprising that many companies disclosed that their data-driven business decisions have taken a hit from 44% in 2017 to 43% in 2018 and is going even lower in the upcoming years.

There are other factors for such incompetency from data visualizations, but their remains on the top. However, even after such stats, companies have not yet given up on dashboards to this day. So why is that so? To understand this better let's evaluate the dashboard in question and how is it assisting the company with their solutions.

A dashboard is a user panel that provides all the vital information about the data that the user needs according to their specific requirements to make an informed decision. So a dashboard spreads out the information in an easy to understand manner.

So the coding aspect of a dashboard is complex and can hinder the user to fish out the crucial information and can thus cause chaos; this will result in incomplete access to information, which they must need. During the programming phases, a lot of information is either lost or misplaced, and the data visualizations end up not making much sense.

Here, the companies are not customizing the dashboard appropriately, by going for rigid approaches.

If you feel that you need to educate your employees and data analysts and want them to reinforce better ideas, you can consider enrolling in Data Analytics and Visualization certifications.

Future investments in data visualizations

Nevertheless, the future of data visualizations is quite bright, it seems as if companies will keep on investing in data visualizations and dashboards in the upcoming years. A recent survey reveals that 84% of participants plan on increasing their data dashboard budget for the next year, however, most of them only plan on doing it moderately.

Mainly because if the companies focus on a particular aspect of information, they can sometimes yield successful results. Also, having a clear dashboard deployment strategy will help an organization’s team understand the needs and objectives of a project better, which would make the entire process straightforward and practical.

Conclusion

Data visualizations are going to be a part of an organization’s data practices for a long time. They offer valuable support for an enterprise’s decision making, problem-solving, and consensus among many other operations. Additionally, data visualizations improve the productivity and efficiency of the workplace.

It is a key part of a business’s success, however, to leverage it to its maximum potential, firms should focus on building powerful data visualization and dashboard strategies to provide users with information consistently.