The art of successful data presentation is not a difficult subject to learn. Nevertheless many people ignore the potential benefits they can gain provided little time, effort and some useful tools. What should be done to increase data efficiency?
One day I was surfing the web in search of new useful, interesting or simply amusing websites. Among others I came across one resource. I will not give its URL in order not to be accused of hidden promotion or counter-advertising. I can only say that the majority of the website content consisted of the variety of statistics about everything on the Earth. Biggest animals, most successful movies, longest buildings, top search terms and so on, and so forth The presented information seemed to be rather structured. It was divided into special categories like Animal world, Human actions. IT facts etc. where every separate record was given in the form of so called TOP 10.
But I got completely lost in the abundance of the information. The reason is simple. There was nothing to catch my eye. Words, words and nothing but the words got me depressed. And I left the site though the information given really was interesting to me.
It is widely known that the majority of the information we receive comes to our mind through images. The speed of visual data perception and adoption is much higher than in the case of mere text. No matter how unique is the content, plain figures enumeration without appropriate image support usually causes irritation and desire to get rid of the annoying factor. At the same time even simple small chart or diagram can make U-turn in the situation. So how this fact can be used to make people come, stay and above all return to your website?
For instance let’s take the websites of numerous banks, investment companies and financial corporations. In the conditions of the developing crisis they are obliged to fight for every existing or potential customer. So why not to represent so essential data of the infinite economic and financial indices, rates and values in the form of bar graph or histogram? They will display the entire picture to the clients as well as give the possibility to better data analysis.
One day I was surfing the web in search of new useful, interesting or simply amusing websites. Among others I came across one resource. I will not give its URL in order not to be accused of hidden promotion or counter-advertising. I can only say that the majority of the website content consisted of the variety of statistics about everything on the Earth. Biggest animals, most successful movies, longest buildings, top search terms and so on, and so forth The presented information seemed to be rather structured. It was divided into special categories like Animal world, Human actions. IT facts etc. where every separate record was given in the form of so called TOP 10.
But I got completely lost in the abundance of the information. The reason is simple. There was nothing to catch my eye. Words, words and nothing but the words got me depressed. And I left the site though the information given really was interesting to me.
It is widely known that the majority of the information we receive comes to our mind through images. The speed of visual data perception and adoption is much higher than in the case of mere text. No matter how unique is the content, plain figures enumeration without appropriate image support usually causes irritation and desire to get rid of the annoying factor. At the same time even simple small chart or diagram can make U-turn in the situation. So how this fact can be used to make people come, stay and above all return to your website?
For instance let’s take the websites of numerous banks, investment companies and financial corporations. In the conditions of the developing crisis they are obliged to fight for every existing or potential customer. So why not to represent so essential data of the infinite economic and financial indices, rates and values in the form of bar graph or histogram? They will display the entire picture to the clients as well as give the possibility to better data analysis.
The principal aim of the data visualization is to communicate information but in more effective, clear and obvious way than simple text does. Today we have plenty of tools visualize data on the website. The best way to input the given data to the website content in the attractive and eye-catching manner is to use flash components. Most of them don’t need any installation, work with the majority of scripting languages, run on many browsers and support dynamic data update due to XML-format support. Variety of colors, chart types and interactivity make them great tool for creating completely tunable and scalable animated charts and graphs.
...to be continued...
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