Beyond the Bar Chart

Interactive data visualization powers exploration

By Amanda Curtiss

Analysts and executives alike recognize the stumbling blocks of contemporary analytics: endless columns of data, inflexible charts, disparate reports and delayed information that impede timely decision making. Gathering the intelligence needed can take weeks and sometimes doesn’t even produce the results originally sought – or produces them too late for decision makers to act. This is life before data visualization.

Fortunately, several forces are propelling organizations out of the old life and into a new era of analytics. Not least among these forces is the desire for a dynamic way to explore information.

“If you look at what we’re exposed to as consumers of data in the ‘5-to-9’ off-hours versus the ‘9-to-5’ work hours, there is great disparity,” says Gaurav Verma, Product Marketing Manager at SAS. “You go home at 5 p.m., and all evening you’re interacting with amazing tools on the Internet. You see the magic of Ajax (an online development that increases Web usability by speeding the download process). Google Earth has satellite views, panning and zoom. You can do all kinds of things with these programs, and then you come to work at 9 a.m., and you say ‘I have a bar graph with some rows and columns. And I can’t do anything with it. It just sits there.’” That no longer has to be the case.

Interactivity at its best
Data visualization moves beyond the confines of that bar graph, painting a vibrant portrait of data that today’s users crave. With interactive graphs, users can examine information from multiple perspectives and in various forms while incorporating as many variables as they want. In the past, an analyst would have had to build and run multiple queries against large data sets to gain insight; now visualization technology draws an immediate picture of trends and relationships by allowing users to run visual queries. By expediting the long calculations that analytics otherwise requires, Verma says, such features ease data exploration.

Just as they streamline the discovery process, these features produce sleek presentation formats to engage information consumers – even in meetings, where graphs traditionally are flat and inflexible.

User-friendly graphics and interactivity enable users who are not analysts to use data visualization, making the technology perfect for the business setting as well as statistical research. In particular, executives in a corporate organization can use the technology for faster and better decision making.

“Traditionally, we go through a process where an information producer takes information, analyzes and regroups it such that an information consumer can easily digest it,” Verma explains. “Visualization removes the complexity of that process and organizes data so that average information users can get visual insights on their own – much faster than if they had to wait for a data report to appear.”

A powerful combination
Data visualization is especially effective in business intelligence. To that end, those seeking business insights might use SAS Visual BI, which combines SAS and JMP® technologies, to create powerful visual analytics. Line-of-business managers or executives can bypass data table navigation and quickly find the information they need to make better, more immediate decisions. What’s remarkable about SAS Visual BI is its flexibility: The tool can aggregate and display data from any corporate level in any industry, which means it is useful in task-specific analyses.

“It all depends on your business function,” says Verma’s colleague Tammi Kay George, also a Product Marketing Manager at SAS. “Your dashboard will display data that is most relevant to your job.”

George warns that there is much more to data visualization than nifty graphics. Other technologies have boasted of excellent graphics yet have failed to deliver informative results along with the pictures. In a recent article titled “Pervasive Hurdles to Effective Dashboard Design,” Stephen Few, Principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge, says, “Most vendors rarely take the time to design the visual appearance and functionality of display media in a way that produces the clearest, richest, and most efficient communication possible.”

In fact, overemphasis on aesthetics has often left users unsatisfied, George says. “Analysts were saying, ‘Don’t just toss me a bunch of pretty 3-D graphs. Never mind how great the format is; the data has to be meaningful, and it has to present itself in a way that enables me to act.’”

Unlike anything else on the market, SAS Visual BI provides robust analytics as well as “whiz-bang cool” graphics, says George. Users can examine the minutiae of data or survey a broader picture, depending on their needs. If a problem occurs in a single variable, the technology allows an analyst to focus on that discrepancy, unearth its root cause and quickly convey that information to a decision maker in the organization who can address the problem.

Enabling swift, efficient action
The dashboards included in SAS Visual BI support precise troubleshooting by showing a field of monitored metrics, color-coded to reflect their level of urgency. According to Few, that’s exactly the kind of feature that a dashboard needs to be useful: “Dashboard display media must present measures of what’s going on, usually in the context of some comparison to express performance, and do so in a way that can be perceived and understood at a glance, even when surrounded by a dense array of information.”

Verma describes the dashboard feature of SAS Visual BI in just that way: “When I turn on my desktop in the morning, my dashboard shows me all the areas that I’m focusing on. Some are red, some amber and green. Green I don’t need to worry about. Amber I need to keep an eye on. Red I need to focus on right now. And I can immediately start acting from that.”

Enabling a swift response to problems is just one part of the overall speed of visualization technology, a trait that makes it perfect for environments in which fast decisions are crucial to success. The analytics are simple enough for everyone to understand. But the analytics are also powerful and detailed enough for analysts to use in exploring and discovering trends in data, and also flexible enough for use in a variety of situations.

In addition, the graphics help data consumers to comprehend trends better and enhance a report’s visual appeal. In fact, the graphics are what ultimately elevate data visualization above traditional analytics software because they give everyone access to information that was formerly shrouded in a confusing haze of numbers.

“Some people are going to be able to glean insight from tables of numbers – your typical, statistically based interfaces,” says George. “But most people need to see it to believe it – and that’s what interactive data visualization can do for you.”