Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

NIMBLE: NO DEATH BY 1,000 GRAPHS

Business executives dread nothing more than the long PowerPoint presentation with multiple slides that have dozens of eye charts, overwhelming graphs, and unnecessary information. Hopefully, your business audience will be interested in your analytical topic, as you are tying back to a critical objective for the business, as we have discussed numerous times throughout this book. Yet people have only a limited attention span to give to your team’s analysis and accompanying data visualization. Some analysts may be put off by this; however, it truly is a matter of competing priorities and cognitive capacity. Next time one of your analysts is upset because the VP of product wasn’t patient enough to review the 10 graphs he put together on product adoption, teach him about the idea of cognitive overload and that scholarly research shows that the more effort you require of someone to process your graphs, the less likely the person will accurately understand the meaning you are trying to convey.11 That point of cognitive overload is a moving target and will be a function of your audience’s conceptual understanding and previous knowledge when interacting with your data visualization. However, it’s best to assume overload will happen quickly and include only as few data visualizations as possible. Reducing the number of graphs and charts, while maintaining the key points you must convey, is a principle that a business audience will always appreciate.