The Need for Speed Driving Data Visualization

Quickly understanding data is key to giving companies a real advantage in an increasingly competitive world.

Effective data visualization makes it easier to extract insights and illustrate actionable recommendations, ensuring that business decisions are based on data and facts rather than on guesswork or senior-management hunches. Technological changes have accelerated timelines across all industries at breakneck speed. Data is more readily available, and it is more critical than ever to ensure it is easily and correctly digested to provide timely actionable insights.

 

Major shifts in data visualization

As the global economy speeds up, and unprecedented changes, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, make the world more unpredictable than ever. It’s critical that businesses understand the changes around them and can generate relevant and contextualized insights that prompt effective action. Over the last five years, data visualization has changed significantly to support evolving demand. A major focus on improving the speed at which companies can access and use accurate and insightful data meant making the path from research to data visualization to a business decision as short, sharp, and effective as possible.

Major shifts in these five key areas have contributed significantly to an increased speed of response:

With the democratization of research and the advent of accessible tools, previous barriers to entry for large-scale research have fallen significantly. Where prohibitive costs, lack of skilled staff, and access to infrastructure may have made timely feedback impossible for all but the largest brands, the new generation of tools has knocked down the barriers. Smaller brands can now access actionable market research using accessible tools to collect, visualize, and digest large amounts of data.

Organizations are moving to data-driven decision-making and data-driven culture, and as they do so more people across departments bring their customer knowledge and skillset to understanding data. Accelerated collaboration helps provide targeted value to consumers, giving them what they want by providing products and solutions that are needed in the marketplace.

 

1. Simplicity

Packaged tools and end-to-end solutions have emerged powering faster reactions and offer instant feedback to ensure businesses don’t miss time-critical opportunities. The time needed for research has collapsed from being measured in weeks to days to hours, enabling more agile and confident business development.

Making the complex simple is the true aim of any data visualization tool, allowing less-specialist users to concentrate on immediate insights. With technology as the expert background enabler, businesses focus on using insights to drive success.

 

2. Collaboration

Businesses need to be able to share insights easily with multiple stakeholders. Quick insights, diagnostic, or detailed explorations both need to be seen at time-critical decision points.

The ability to share well-presented data across departments and stakeholders, as well as create reports with colleagues using a shared platform, fosters an accelerated level of effective collaboration. This is further enabled by the power of having a single login to access, merge, and export data from a single platform.

 

3. Flexibility

Interactive tools make it simpler to interrogate data in real-time for instant results with flexibility that enhances the potential for deeper understanding. The ability to filter information by gender, age, or other demographics, or by different consumer types, allows a granular picture of target markets to emerge with potential opportunities that may have been missed with less agile access to data.

Multi-layered access for different needs and stakeholders allows for a range of requirements, from immediate KPI summaries to the ability to delve into extreme details to substantiate decisions and explore further opportunities as needed.

 

4. Automation

Integration of technologies such as machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) reduce the direct workload for humans while uncovering better insights through automation. AI-powered data visualization not only helps businesses find what they are looking for but can also suggest opportunities not previously seen.

Tools are continually expanding automation capabilities, supporting more accurate visualization with previously unseen speed and accessibility, and results are gathered at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional methods.

Templates and automation drive quality standardized inputs, resulting in stronger and more accurate insights. Ability to extract data into the cloud or to create APIs that link to companies or third-party reporting platforms enables wider data integration.

 

Adapting to key industry trends

Everyone is looking for something instantly relevant, easily viewed, understood within 30 seconds, and offering critical business insight to prompt valuable action.

In an increasingly digital world, businesses need to understand and adapt to the ‘new normal’. Finding a profitable way forward will depend on having access to up-to-date information on consumer behavior to make sense of the massive scale of unexpected change. Businesses need to adapt quickly – or fail.

The rise of end-to-end research platforms that combine smart technology and expert research solutions feeding automated data visualization, means that decision-makers from all parts of the business can quickly and easily get the answers they need with confidence.

One platform leveraging emerging technology and offering a one-stop-shop that lets you take control of your data is the new version of Toluna Start, released this month.

Toluna Start packages sophisticated research methodology and access to a massive number of consumers within a single ecosystem which means businesses can make sense of their data immediately. Data accessible from the start is easy to manage for different levels of understanding, which is critical when massive amounts of data are in use to facilitate better decision-making.

 

 

Looking to the future

Interpreting data is a critical aspect of running a successful business, this reliance on data will only accelerate in the future. Making the complexities of data as simple to understand open up unexpected insights and drive new enlightened ways of thinking.

 

 

Integration with different data sets and the ability to encompass bespoke or third-party data systems offers more detailed dashboards and comprehensive support for faster decision-making. Making data available to wider audiences enables more productive collaboration to holistically benefit businesses.

The future may be unclear in our world of accelerated and unpredictable changes but the ability to quickly gather, interpret and act on valuable insights to mitigate risk and take swift definitive action to support business success will remain a critical tool to all.