How to visualize form data quickly? Just reduce the noise! Two methods are demonstrated.
I’m sure we all have the experience of having to share forms with our supervisors or colleagues during a presentation. However, no matter what the source of the information is, you can’t just copy and paste it into a presentation.
Usually we put data or information through some process, including identification, cleaning, conversion and so on. This allows us to find useful information to support important decisions or to handle various business issues.
But in reality, sometimes these data come in so fast that they have to be reported on stage the next day, leaving no time for complicated processing. Sometimes, it is just a routine group meeting that does not require too much detailed analysis, but only a rough overview.
Here are two super simple ways of reducing the noise to quickly organize the data. Determine whether all data points are necessary, as too much data may make it difficult to detect critical points.
Let’s take the fake data of several cities in Taiwan as an example, when I want to emphasize the data of Taipei City(台北), what should we do?
All we should do is reduce the noise: present unnecessary information in a gray(or other less colorful colors) background, so that the focus of readers will stand out and people won’t feel confused. If you simply highlight important information in bright colors, it can sometimes be too complicated. As shown below, we can achieve a good result in less than 30 seconds.
In many cases, we will convert these tables into line charts or bar charts. We can generate line charts quickly with a variety of basic software. In some cases, a line chart can serve your needs better than a table, allowing the reader to understand the growth trend. But can you focus on the growth trend of Taipei(台北) in the following line chart?
In this case, when we just want to focus on the effectiveness of Taipei(台北). We can reduce the noise by changing the color of the other lines to gray (or other less colorful colors). This way, the reader can immediately focus on the performance of Taipei (台北). At first glance, we can see that Taipei’s performance is growing steadily compared to other cities.
These are two super fast ways to process form data to make it easy to communicate. Processed data can quickly and efficiently guide the reader through the content and allow them to understand what the data is saying ( or show them what you want) .
Having a small amount of important information can help your supervisor or colleague find insights soon. If you have enough time to analyze the data, or if you need more complete analysis of the data in your project, then these two tips will not work well for you. XD
