What are the advantages and disadvantages of data visualization?

At first glance, it can seem like there are no disadvantages or drawbacks to something like data visualization. After all, it’s helping people see and understand data in easier, more digestible ways. However, there are some areas that can be troublesome when creating visualizations. So if you keep those in mind and compensate for them before you even build your first visualization, then you’ll be able to create something amazing.

In this article we’ll cover:

• What is data visualization?
• Advantages and disadvantages of data visualization
  • Advantages
  • Disadvantages
• Using data visualization in business

Data visualization is a way to represent numerical information and data through graphical representation, which makes it both more accessible and more understandable. This leverages visual elements such as charts, graphs, and maps and provides an easy way to understand patterns and trends in data. It also provides and easy way to present data to a non-expert audience and still ensure they understand it. 

Learn more about data visualization.

So what are the advantages and disadvantages of data visualization? Generally speaking, we at Tableau will say that advantages far outweigh the disadvantages, but it’s always good to walk into creating a viz with your eyes open, and any possible issues in mind. So below, we’ve outlined the advantages and disadvantages of data visualizations in detail.

As we stated earlier, there are some very clear advantages to using data visualization, and as long as you’re aware of and solving for the disadvantages, then the advantages are far larger than the disadvantages. Some of the advantages of data visualization include things like simple sharing, better quality analysis, and intuitive use. We dive into more of them in-depth below. 

Many people find visuals much easier to understand than numbers or the written word. This means that most people find reading data visualizations much more intuitive than any other way of understanding data. That way even people who don’t like math or say that numbers confuse them can easily scan and understand data, which makes it easy to keep everyone in an organization on the same page.

Similar to the point above, another benefit of data visualization is that it makes sharing data simple and easy because you can ensure that everyone is on the same page when they’re viewing your visualization. Instead of risking people not being able to understand or interpret strings of numbers or raw data, a viz brings everyone onto the same page and is easy to share if you’re using a BI platform. 

Because data visualization is easier to understand and intuitive, it naturally leads to better analysis, because people are more readily able to understand and draw conclusions from vizzes. It’s easy to use a visualization to identify patterns, outliers, and trends, which can help when analyzing the data to draw meaningful conclusions.

The easier that data is to understand and analyze, the quicker people can draw their conclusions and use it to make decisions. And saved time is everything in business. It enables more people to see and understand data in order to make the best decisions possible to move them forward in business.

With such great advantages, what disadvantages could possibly put a damper on it? Well, sometimes people can accidentally (or even purposefully) misrepresent data, or your message may get muddied. Or, if you’re not careful in how you build your viz, you may end up with inexact conclusions or improper visualizations. We expand on those disadvantages below.

The core of a lot of issues and disadvantages stems from this main one. If you’re not careful in how you build your visualizations, you may end up with visualizations that don’t properly convey your data. This can lead to confusion and issues down the line if you use that improper viz to do analysis and draw conclusions.

You can solve for this by ensuring that the people in your organization (and you) have the proper training to create good vizzes with your chosen BI software.

As talked about above, a risk of using data visualization is that your audience may draw incorrect conclusions. And that’s not just because of improper visualizations. Sometimes a visual medium can lead to confusion in the viewer, so different people in your audience may walk away with drastically different conclusions after viewing the same viz.

You can solve for this by ensuring that you explain your vizzes, and provide a proper key for the viewer to understand.

If you’re creating a visual representation of numerical data, there comes an inherent risk of creating an inexact perception of the data in the mind of the viewer. Especially if there are no keys or ways to hover over the effects to see the exact numbers involved. It’ll give your viewer an idea of the data, and probably enough to draw their own conclusions, but it runs the risk of them having inexact conclusions from inexact data.

You can avoid this by ensuring your visualization is properly labeled, or interactive enough to hover over and show further details.

So after laying out the advantages and disadvantages, it’s clear to everyone that data visualization is a powerful tool to use in business, as long as it’s used properly. Ensure that your vizzes are built properly and carefully, and you’ll find the tool of data visualization will help your business thrive. Use Tableau to help you visualize all your important business data in a meaningful and easy-to-understand way.