Presentation and Visualization Methods

Data Visualization?

E-Commerce industry trends:

To observe the trend of how online retailers have been performing, we can use various visualization techniques like pie chart, line chart.

A pie chart can be useful to show how much market share has been captured by a particular online retailer. 

A bar chart is also an option but it cannot be used to show the trend over a period of time.

Recommendation: Line Chart

A line chart can be used to display trends over a period of time and also provide an easy way to compare online retailers in a particular year.

A line chart connects individual data points and is used to visualize a sequence if values.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/30/amazon_dot_com_holds_ludicrous_lead_in_online_retail_sales/

From the visualization given above we can gain the following insights:

• Individual sales and comparison of the sales of various online retailers
• Rate of growth of each online retailer

Education industry:

To analyze the per-pupil expenditure for public elementary and secondary education in the United States, we can use visualization techniques like bar chart, map, etc.

A bar chart can depict the amount spent in each state in a very easy way. The highest and lowest amount can be easily identified by looking at the height of the bars. 

A pie chart can be used to show but since there are to many sectors the pie chart would look cluttered.

Recommendation: Map

When a map is used for such kind of a representation, it becomes more intuitive and the business gets an option to directly look at on overview of the amount spend by state.

If high/ low values are important then bar chart is the optimal method. If location wise distribution is important then map is the best solution for visualization.

Following is a map that visualized the current pupil expenditure for public elementary and secondary education by state:

Source:

http://nces.ed.gov/edfin/graph_topic.asp?INDEX=1

Telecommunications industry:

In today’s era, mobile phone are slowly replacing desktops. Mobile phones are getting more powerful and most of the work can usually be done using mobile phones. Accessing social media applications is probably the most frequently performed operation from a mobile device. 

Two pie charts can be used with each one visualizing details about social media usage on mobile devices and desktop respectively. 

A table can be used with two columns for each mobile phone and desktop along with the usage statistics in each row for a particular social networking platform. But this is not very intuitive.

Recommendation: Stacked bar

To compare social media usage using mobile devices and desktops, a stacked bar would be the best option.

Stacked bars:

• Display data on top of each other
• Provide an intuitive means to compare two components against each other

Source:

http://www.statista.com/chart/2091/mobile-usage-of-social-networks/

From the visualization given above we can gain the following insights:

• Most of the popular social networking applications are used from the mobile devices
• LinkedIn, Tumblr can focus on improvising their mobile applications further

Thus, visualizations enable businesses to look at the data and make better decisions in less time.