Presentation and Visualization
Methods
The era of today’s technology and
corporate culture has a lot to deal in terms of the data that needs to be
analyzed. In addition, time constraints are applicable on almost all the
professionals. This calls for coming out of the conventional way of analyzing
figures and numbers and stepping in for visual depictions that makes the
interpretation of events easier and quicker. The specific visual, however may
be good for some and otherwise for others. The intended audience and their
requirements need to be paid attention to first. There exists a lot of
effective presentation and visualization methods for various business vignettes
such as telecom bills, insurance premiums, order summaries etc. Though almost
every technique can be utilized to represent any of these, there exists special
visuals that outweigh any others with respect to the appeal and easy
comprehension by the audience who views it. Whereas bar charts may be
sufficient to view the time trend of a particular quantity (ex: demand for a
product), other visuals such as heat maps, scatter plots, dashboards are
equally important in other domains of relevance.
We choose the following business
vignettes to describe the variations of visuals that may be used to represent
the relevant information to the intended audience.
· Retail
sales
· Financial
Services
· Insurance
For each of the
vignettes mentioned above, the following content elaborates upon the
requirements expected out of each of them followed by the recommendations on
best visuals and sample depictions.
1.
Retail
Sales:
The
audience for viewing reports on retail sales varies by size of the organization
as well as role of the people in respect to the organizational hierarchy. Big
organizations’ management desires a global report with a granularity of region/continent
level. People lower in the hierarchy need it to be more granular in terms of
both timeline and regional breakup. The sample chart depicts the markdown in
terms of store and product category at a specific regional level. The report
further highlights the absolute pound amount on right hand side. Along with the
bar charts, outliers are highlighted in the charts that reflect on aggregate
measures, ones that may be of interest to the management in the organization.
2. Financial Services:
The financial organizations such as stock
exchanges, bullion exchange need to analyze the data from a multitude of
angles. Whereas some may like to monitor stock prices of a company over time,
others might want to explore the trend in overall market index. Currency
monitoring is another facet where major currencies of the world are monitored
on price relative to US dollar amount. The sample cited above uses line graph
to monitor the currency prices over time. The report also has a zoom-in feature
to dig into granularity of hours and minutes in a day. Scatter plot depicted on
the right depicts the trend relative to the percentage volatility in a currency
for a particular period of time. This kind of report is routinely used in
institutions such as stock broking firms, equity banking firms etc.
3.
Insurance:
The management in automotive insurance companies are
interested in improvising the probability model upon which they charge premium
on various products offered. On these lines, they often wish to analyze time
series data of the number of accidents happening on a yearly basis compared to
the premium they charge in a particular year. They are also interested in
monitoring the claim ratio of the vehicles involved in order to offer
competitive premium charges to future customers. The sample cited depicts the
number of accidents and claim ratio in a bar chart format with plotting lines
depicting the other two variables. Such a model suffices in easy comprehension
of the data over the years which in some way also helps analyze performance of
the company.
The above mentioned depictions and explanations are brief
overviews on types of visuals and presentations desired by different kinds of
organizations and stakeholders. They are not exhaustive and highlight the
features that are relevant to the samples that have been cited along with them.
References:
