What should be considered on Visualization?

Creating a report with stunning, meaningful and appropriate visuals is the key for delivering the information quickly, hence special consideration has to be made when designing reports. Otherwise, the created report will not be attractive and users will not see what they want and as they want.

There are few things need to be considered when designing reports;

• Placement - you need to make sure that visuals added to the report are placed or positioned at the right place. How do we decide? Generally, most important visuals (A KPI for an example) should be placed in the top-left corner of the report because it is the place everyone looks at immediately. Not only that, when the report is opened using a mobile device, this makes sure that the important ones are displayed first. In addition to that, make sure the space between visuals is consistence and sized appropriately.
• Appropriate Visuals - If something can be displayed using a Column Chart does not mean that it is the best visual for showing it. Therefore, right visual should be selected for displaying information. For an example, if just one value has to be shown, something like Revenue for the month, a visual like KPI or Card can be used. If something needs to be shown with values against a set of parameters, something like, showing revenue by month should be displayed with Column Chart. If something needs to be shown against set of parameters using percentage, not values, Pie or Donut will be appropriate.
• Story Telling - Make sure that you report contains relevant and related information only, it should not be cluttered. If the report is created for Sales Department, make sure it shows information related to it. Not only that, if the report contains set of visuals related another area, example, a process, highlight it or group them. You can add a unfilled rectangle covering visuals related.
• Formatting - The size of the visual, font used, font size, color and labels, all matters. Make sure that the title is properly displayed for visuals and you can make some visuals large and some small based on the importance of them. Same goes for font size. If it is a KPI and it is most important one, increasing the font size of it will definitely add a value to the report. Another important thing in formatting is, showing numerals properly. No need to show the whole number unless the visual is something like table. Generally, if the number is really large, consider to show it in thousands or millions.
• Coloring - There are two things to consider with coloring; background color and colors on visuals. Generally light background color will do a lot as visuals can be highlighted with most of the colors. Therefore it is recommended to make the background light, something like white. However, making the background dark has become a trend because it makes the dashboard elegant. But when selecting colors for visuals, you need to be very careful as dark colors in visuals may not blend properly with a dark background. Another consideration is, company theme. Your company may have a color theme for all web applications and you might have to stick to it. If so, select appropriate colors for visuals based on the theme.
  What about colors used with visuals? One thing you need to remember is, the standard color-set used with BI. Generally, we use Green for Excellent, Amber for Neutral and Red for worse. Therefore, you should use a color like Red for indicating a success of something. Another thing is, do not use all these three colors with all types of visuals. For an example, when a KPI is shown, one color is used for either coloring font or background for the visual that is fine. Similarly, these three colors can be used with a tabular visual with all possible cells that is something you need to consider. You may see your table busy when many cells are colored with all three colors, hence it is better to color only one type of cells with one color.

There are many more tiny things to consider but above considered as the most important considerations. List anything if you think that I have missed some.

Difference between Reporting and Analysis in Business Intelligence solutions

Every company implements a business intelligence solution for tracking and improving the business performance through reporting and analysis, setting it as the ultimate goal of business intelligence solution. Some solutions completely focus on analysis only and some focus on reporting only but most focus on both, making sure that solution delivered addresses requirements coming of all level of the company. What is the different between Reporting and Analysis with BI?

Reporting

This is the main communication channel used for getting information from BI solution. Formal reports or operational reports are not recommended through BI solution but production reports, interactive reports (up to some extent) and dashboard reports are common. Most reports show summarized values and they are printable. It is not uncommon to see tabular reports but reports with graphical elements are the most common. When planning, audience needs to be understood, need to have a good knowledge on how reports need to be viewed and delivered. There are mainly two types of reports that can be delivered through a BI solution;

• IT-provided reportsReports that are developed and managed by developers are called as IT-provided reports. These reports are developed based on requirements given by business users. Business users have no facilities to modify reports but content of the reports can be changed using filters added or using interacting features such as expanding/collapsing enabled in the report.
• Self-service reports
  Self-service reports are authored by business users without getting support from IT. Special tools that are more user-friendly for business users have to be given, empowering business users. Tools should support authoring simple reports such as production report as well as complex reports such as dashboard reports. Though IT has no involvement with this, repository that holds data required with business terms has to be supplied by IT (example, data warehouse, or models) and sometime, IT manages developed reports too.

Analysis

Analysis is detail examination or interpretation of data delivered by BI solution. Smart business users explorer data in the model and perform specific examinations for seeing the insight or find a hidden pattern. Example, these business users will use tools like Excel, Power BI, Tableau for creating their own models or doing their own experiments. General users do the same but not with specialized tool but with reports and dashboards. Generally, following analytical requirements are addressed with BI solutions;

• Interactive analysis
  This type of analysis requires key BI functionality such as slicing and dicing for analyzing data with various segments or dimensions. Results of these analysis can be published as reports or can be used for improving business process such as promotions.
• Dashboard and scorecards
  Combination of various KPIs and summarized information with graphical widgets are shown with dashboards and scorecards, allowing users to analyze data with functionalities like drilling down and drilling through.
• Data mining (machine learning)
  This allows users to do various experiments with data using machine learning algorithm for understanding the trends and patterns related business processes and using them for improving the business.