These days, data is everywhere.
“People have a lot of information, but they don’t necessarily know how to use that information in helpful ways,” said Chris Shaffer, Director of Institutional Research and Sponsored Programs at Shawnee State University.
Higher education professionals are getting good at gathering data, but can get stalled on exactly how best to use it, and how to convey what they’ve learned. That’s where visual analytics comes in.
“When you’re handling data, you need to ask yourself how it will be parsed, how it will be physically displayed, and how it can be conveyed to a larger audience,” Shaffer said.
Visual analytics is a way of representing data in an interactive and manipulable way to help the audience understand, remember and process the information, as well as draw conclusions from it.
“Presenting data visually provides a high level trend and pattern that may be missed in traditional rows and columns of data,” said Brian Williams, Vice President of Enrollment and Institutional Analytics at John Carroll University. “Visual presenting allows us to process large amounts of data more easily and lets lines, color, location of data points to point us in a direction that needs further exploration.”
Beyond the blue and red pie chart
There are many ways to make dashboards more logical, more intuitive, and more interesting, and invite exploration by users which in turn enables curiosity.”
A few questions to consider:
- What colors and shapes should your chart take?
“If you want to convey a certain point, a bar chart might be better than a circle,” Shaffer said. “Different tools are better at conveying different information.” For example, you choose different colors for different variables.
However, people process length better than color, and prefer visual asymmetry, according to Shaffer—so it can help to know a bit about how human brains work. For example, Shaffer recommends: Remember the rule of thirds. Putting information in the center of the page may be less effective than an asymmetrical layout.
- What information should be interactive?
Almost any aspect of your visualization could warrant a deeper dive. Perhaps you need to provide sourcing, evidence of change over time, or more complex or complementary analysis.
“When you design for interaction,” Williams said, “you are empowering others. It’s not about making a point with data, it’s about letting go of the data and allowing others to find insight on their own.” However, if every piece is linked, your audience may get overwhelmed and lose track of what’s important. Be selective.
- How can your visuals emphasize or reinforce your data?
For example, if you are showing a trend that is increasing over time, but the layout of the font or the representation of the data looks like it’s decreasing, that will undermine your point and confuse your audience. How can you reimage the data to obviously support the conclusion?
“If you’re analyzing and communicating data—especially if your institution doesn’t have a lot of resources—you can really maximize your efficiency and finances if you understand a few fundamentals about data visualization,” Shaffer said. “I’m at a public institution without a lot of resources, and I’m making reports everyday. We’re involved all over campus in strategic decisions because of that.”
Hands-on dashboard workshop: Bring your problems!
“Dashboard analytics can really be useful for something like a cohort analysis,” Shaffer said.
Williams and Shaffer will lead the afternoon half-day data visualization workshop prior to AACRAO’s 2016 SEM Conference in San Antonio, November 6-9.
Presenters will bring a sample data set so people can practice making dashboards, and they invite attendees to bring their own questions to create a working dashboard by the end of the session. It’s a “Bring your own device” session, and attendees should be mindful to not bring material that could compromise student privacy.
Participants will discuss topics such as: visualization best practices, creating multi-variable groups, how to make big data sets manageable, and how artistic choices can better convey information.
Register for the SEM Data Lab: Hands-on Visualization and Dashboards preconference workshop here.
Learn more and register for 2016 AACRAO SEM!