The Business Value of Data Visualization
Best-selling author Steve Wexler shows that good visualizations can deliver six times more business value than naïve ones.
In the Data Leadership Collaborative, Wexler described testing two visualizations of the same 68 pieces of sales data. He asked subjects to find the most and least profitable product category and region. Give it a try in the video below!
On average, it took three seconds to find an answer using the "before" visualization and 20 seconds with the one that Wexler improved—six times faster. But that's not all: 100% got the right answer with the improved version, compared to 80% before.
Steve's survey wasn't formal, but his results ring true.
With the Wexler Test in mind, let's extrapolate our return on investment. For example, if your company has 1,000 employees and each makes ten decisions a day, a good visualization could help you make 10,000 better decisions and avoid 2,000 mistakes every day.
The cost? In this simple example,
Google Sheets.
The time of a skilled analyst.
Good visualizations yield great returns.
