Impact of Interactive Data Visualization for Product Growth
PMs and Product Leads responsible for achieving growth numbers often find themselves surrounded by the only source of truth in the business world: data. On a day-to-day basis, they are responsible for discovering user trends, understanding user preferences, and highlighting other patterns that can directly impact user and product growth. In tinkering with data, most PMs rely on interactive data visualizations to help them understand and communicate the story of their users and products.
These viz, often comprising charts, graphs, and other visual representations, allow PMs to discover insights from a huge amount of data and communicate complex information and insights in a user-friendly format that is easy to digest and play with.
You might wonder how these interactive data visualizations are any different from other types of data visualization, often termed static data visualizations. We’ll get into that now, beginning with the meaning of the very term.
TL;DR:
- Interactive data visualization aids product growth by facilitating real-time interaction with data.
- Unlike static visualizations, interactive ones allow for trend identification, collaboration, granular exploration, and scenario analysis.
- Top tools for interactive data visualization include Tableau, Houseware, Infogram, DataWrapper, and Google Charts.
- Choosing the right tool depends on specific requirements and preferences, with purpose-built tools like Houseware offering tailored solutions for product analytics.
What Is Interactive Data Visualization?
Interactive data visualization techniques enable users to interact with data for better understanding and easier exploration. These techniques create representations like graphs, charts, maps, and tables, allowing product managers and teams to modify and interact with elements of these visualizations directly in a few clicks.
Unlike traditional types of data visualization, where data is passively read, interactive visualization (or a dashboard) enables users to explore and play with the data actively, offering significant advantages over static visual representations.
Real-time engagement with the displayed information enables product managers to dive deeper into the data, uncover more details, generate new insights, and ask questions. This interactive approach allows them to extract more value from the available datasets. This further leads to a richer understanding of the information presented.
In short, an interactive data visualization dashboard lets you do the following:
- Collect and combine data from all data sources
- Dig into visualizations and dashboards
- Generate AI-powered insights
- Have a fully functional mobile experience
"Due to the increasingly enormous amount of data available, analytics must be represented visually and be immediately comprehensible. AI algorithms need to extract pertinent facts and the platform should enable the user to go from a macro picture to a granular analysis in one click.”
Difference between Interactive Data Visualization and Static Data Visualization
Benefits of Interactive Data Visualization
Human brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than they do text. That’s not just a fact but definitely something you’ve experienced as well. With this fundamental advantage that visuals have, interactive data visualizations not only help process information faster but also allow you to dig deeper with every click, revealing a new and more detailed picture. Here are some benefits of interactive data visualizations in product analytics.
1. Identify trends and patterns faster
Modern-day PMs need to stay on their toes to identify recurring trends, behaviors, and patterns from data and user feedback. However, static visualizations offer only a snapshot view of data. It doesn't allow for dynamic exploration and manipulation. Comparatively, interactive visualizations allow PMs to spot trends more rapidly, as they can drill down into specific data points, zoom in on timeframes, or filter by relevant variables.
2. Better collaboration with other teams
Coming to product decisions requires alignment from different stakeholders from various teams. This is almost impossible with static visualizations. Interactive visualizations allow for in-app commenting and tagging to facilitate seamless collaboration. They enable teams to interact with and manipulate data simultaneously. It brings together business development, customer success, product development, and marketing teams. This results in better communication, alignment, and faster decisions.
3. Allows PMs to explore granular details
Product managers are the champions of customer-centricity. They need to continuously gather insights, conduct user research, and analyze the impact of product features. Interactive controls like filters, custom events, and dashboards allow them to explore data dynamically and delve deeper into specific data points.
4. Manipulate data for analyzing different scenarios
An essential task of product teams is to determine how different changes affect the product and its users. This is made easier with editable visualizations as PMs can define testing scenarios, track results, and communicate the changes to the project manager.
5. Stay on track with notifications and alerts
Interactive visualizations help PMs track key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics. The notifications and real-time alerts help them take timely action and stay on track. Whether it's a problem needing immediate attention or an opportunity to optimize their product features, these tools help product managers stay on top.
Steps to Create Interactive Visualizations
Fortunately, with modern tools, creating an interactive visualization is easy and quick. These steps, coupled with data visualization best practices, can ensure your digital product meets expectations. Here’s what you need to do.
1. Data consolidation
The first step is to collect raw data. You can replicate data, standardize, ingest, and transform raw data into clean, analytics-ready information.
2. KPI identification
Next, identify the primary metrics that align with your business objective. Selecting KPIs is a foundational step since your visualizations will reflect them. For instance, you should choose metrics like product usage, user engagement, and conversion rates if you’re trying to figure out feature adoption.
3. Visualization design
Then, select the types of graphs, charts, and maps that best answer your question. For instance, a Flow diagram like the one below is ideal when visualizing a customer journey. Just keep in mind that your visualizations should be kept clean and simple.
4. Collaboration and sharing
Your visualizations should be shareable for collective feedback and insights. Share them with the approved users to explore the data.
Interactive Data Visualization Examples
Here are a few interactive data visualization dashboards that enable users to explore data for various use cases.
- Product Analytics Dashboard
- Web Analytics Dashboard
- Mobile App Analytics Dashboard
- SEO Dashboard
- Retention Dashboard
- Features and Events Dashboard
- Social Media Dashboard
Read our blog Product Analytics Dashboard: How to Build It and Examples to learn about these visualizations in detail.
Platforms for Interactive Data Visualization
Thankfully, a lot of tools are available today that offer interactive dashboards and cutting-edge features. Here, we list the top five tools and their pros and cons.
1. Tableau
Tableau is one of the most commonly used BI tools. It is known for its interactive reporting features. You can create colour-coded charts that showcase geographically essential data in a format that’s easier to digest and analyze. Tableau caters to people across various sectors, industries, businesses, and researchers.
2. Houseware
Houseware is a third-generation product analytics software that provides interactive reporting features. This warehouse-native platform allows product teams to navigate all aspects of the product by offering a visual narrative. With Houseware, you can slice and dice each visualization to tailor it to your specific problem statement. Whether you prefer line charts, table views, bar charts, or customized metrics, Houseware offers unparalleled flexibility and clarity in your numbers.
3. Infogram
Infogram is a data visualization tool that is not heavy-duty. It excels at summarizing and explaining the outcomes of data analysis to an audience or simplifying complex concepts for general public comprehension. Even non-designers can create engaging visualizations using infographics, social media posts, maps, dashboards, and various other tools.
4. DataWrapper
DataWrapper is an easy-to-use data visualization tool perfect for creating charts, tables, and maps for websites. It is great for small organizations that have a minimal budget. It also has zero code, which means you do not need design and coding skills to create different visualizations. DataWrapper caters to media companies, government organizations, financial institutions, and others.
5. Google Charts
Google Charts is a free data visualization tool offering maps, scatter charts, histograms, treemaps, timelines, gauges, and many others. These charts are interactive. In addition, they can be customized entirely via simple CSS editing. This platform is ideal for people who are comfortable with coding and want a powerful, free solution.
Choosing the Right Interactive Data Visualization Tool
Amongst different data visualization techniques and tools, selecting the one that aligns with your unique requirements is paramount. Picking the most powerful tool available may not always be the best option. Sometimes, a simpler tool can create precisely what you need in a shorter time.
A purpose-built tool for digital products is ideal for increasing a product’s value by identifying new ways to satisfy users and attract newcomers. Houseware, a next-generation product analytics tool, lets you harness the power of interactive dashboards to bring positive results. See for yourself by booking a demo with our team today!
