Selasa, 02 Juli 2024
Penting untuk kamu mengetahui bahwa tersedia beberapa segi yang pastinya jadi pertimbangan oleh perusahaan didalam terima kamu sebagai karyawan atau tingkatkan jabatan kamu.
Bukan lagi soal nilai akademismu tapi lebih kepada pengalaman dan kecerdasan kamu didalam melacak solusi, menanggulangi masalah, dan pastinya mengambil sikap paling baik berasal dari tiap cara di bidang pekerjaanmu.
Dimana, beberapa segi tersebut tentu tentang bersama skill atau kebolehan personal seseorang yang pastinya tak banyak terbujuk oleh nilai akademis.
Oleh karena itu, kamu yang hendak melamar kerja atau sedang merintis karir di perusahaan tertentu, kudu memperhitungkan beberapa skill tertentu yang dibutuhkan perusahaan.
Apa saja sih kebolehan yang jadi prioritas oleh perusahaan itu? Jangan khawatir kawan.
Melalui artikel tips kerja ini, kita dapat menambahkan beberapa Info soal skill mutlak didalam pekerjaan yang patut untuk kamu asah dan kembangkan demi karir masa depanmu.
Skill yang Dibutuhkan oleh Perusahaan
Dalam kaitannya bersama soal kebolehan personal, tentu saja tersedia beberapa skill yang dapat jadi sisi pertimbangan perusahaan untuk terima kamu sebagai karyawan baru atau menempatkanmu pada jabatan yang lebih tinggi. Yuk, kita review infonya.
1 . Komunikatif
Pertama, skill mutlak didalam dunia kerja yang tak dapat kamu abaikan begitu saja adalah soal komunikasi kamu selagi kamu bekerja.
Lebih detailnya, bagaimana kamu menyampaikan pesan perusahaan atau mengkomunikasikan Info mutlak kepada audience bersama bahasa yang cocok dan gampang dipahami.
Ini merupakan kebolehan mutlak yang kudu dimiliki oleh tiap tiap karyawan. Mengingat, tentang bersama bagaimana kamu membangun jaringan di lingkup ruang pekerjaan.
Sebab, komunikasi yang komunikatif tentu dapat lebih berpotensi mengakibatkan kamu dapat diterima kerja atau menarik pimpinan tingkatkan jabatan kamu.
2. Pencari Solusi
Selain komunikasi, tentu saja gangguan solver adalah skill tertentu yang kudu dimiliki oleh beberapa karyawan. Khususnya para karyawan yang memang bekerja di bidang tertentu yang perlu kebolehan menanggulangi masalah.
Oleh karenanya, telah jadi segi mutlak jikalau kebolehan analisa kuat dan kecepatan didalam bertindak sekaligus mengambil ketetapan yang pas adalah perihal yang dibutuhkan perusahaan sebagai aset quality.
Maka berasal dari itu, selalu asah kecerdasanmu bersama menguatkan analisa berdasarkan berbagai sudut pandang agar tercipta sebuah solusi yang tepat.
3. Public Speaking
Kamu bekerja di perusahaan yang mengenai bersama publik? Tentu saja, kamu kudu menguasai basic komunikasi maupun ilmu tentang public speaking.
Dengan kebolehan komunikasi publik yang mumpuni, tentu tiap tiap Info dapat disampaikan bersama teliti dan pas cocok target.
Oleh karena itu, Anda tak dapat pandang remeh kebolehan atau skill public speaking begitu saja. Apalagi, kebolehan ini sebagai tidak benar satu skill yang pastinya benar-benar mutlak didalam menopang karirmu di dunia kerja.
4. Cekatan dan Cakap didalam Bidang Pekerjaan
Sebagaimana diketahui bahwa nilai akademis tak dapat lagi jadi patokan bagi perusahaan untuk menilai kamu secara keseluruhan.
Tentu saja perusahaan dapat memperhitungkan banyak hal. Di antaranya layaknya cakap didalam mengerjakan atau menyelesaikan pekerjaan yang telah jadi tugas tanggung jawab.
Karena, tiap tiap pekerjaan perlu tanggung jawab besar berasal dari para pekerja. Jika pekerjaan selalu selesai pas selagi dan minim berlangsung kekeliruan maka telah barang tentu dapat banyak perusahaan yang melirik kamu.
Bukan tanpa karena mengingat kebolehan atau skill menyelesaikan pekerjaan bersama selagi singkat dan pas dapat menambahkan perlindungan pada tiap perusahaan itu sendiri. Jadi, jangan pandang remeh dapat soal ini.
sumber referensi: lowongan kerja jakarta
Tak Hanya Nilai Akademis, Ini Skill yang Dibutuhkan Perusahaan
Sabtu, 14 April 2018
Conversion is the process of causing something to change from one form to another. In marketing, it’s turning visitors into customers. An important metric in measuring conversion is conversion rate.
Conversion rate = the percentage of visitors to your site who take the action that you desire them to take, whether that means completing a form or buying a product or service.
Many factors contribute to a successful conversion rate. In this article, let’s dive into twelve user experience mistakes that could cost you dearly.
1. Changing the brand identity elements: The Nordstrom story
117-year-old upscale retailer Nordstrom is still strong in business because of its signature brand identity. But what a management change could do to a company can be seen in Nordstrom’s “Reinvent Yourself” campaign of 2000, which took the brand back quite a bit.
The company has 365 stores across 40 states in the United States. All of these stores have the same highly inviting, simple façade with the impactful, full-caps black-and-white logo of Nordstrom stretched across it.
Also, there is a lobby leading inside that adds to the magnificence of the storefront.
Nordstrom’s brand identity is signified by a lot of empty space around its products and calls to action and use of black (among others) as the primary brand color.
The brand exudes panache that appeals to the upper class looking for designer outfits.
Nordstrom’s e-commerce site extends its Spartan storefront design.
If you look at the home page of Nordstrom, you would be wondering how to add those beautiful designer outfits to the cart. There is no “add to cart” or “shop now” button anywhere.
The entire home page is an inviting array of products and features with exceptionally well-shot photos. And there is only one accent color, black, and a lot of empty space.
Image 1 – Nordstrom Home Page
It’s clear that Nordstrom is not for your average Joe, who goes to Amazon, types in “jeans”, and selects “Price: Low to High”. It’s more about relationships than retail.
But back in 2000, Nordstrom, which had undergone a management change outside the family, started the “Reinvent Yourself” campaign with glaring use of red and other colors.
Unfortunately, the inane media selections, blatant disregard of the elegant black, and crudeness in place of subtlety foiled the campaign
One thing we need to learn from this is how a brand appears to its customers. If you are trying to change your brand image, do it in a way that doesn’t distance your most loyal customers.
Give a lot of thought while designing everything around your brand website. The colors should be chosen from among the web safe colors list. Typography should be chosen with a few important points in mind. Your website should be a natural extension of your physical stores.
2. Not providing all possible payment modes
If conversion has to complete, the customer should be able to pay. So, payment convenience is extremely important. These days, e-commerce sites have begun to understand the value of providing every possible payment option to the customers.
Payment through options other than net banking and credit cards is getting popular. Check out home improvement shop Build.com’s payment page providing the additional options such as Amazon Pay and PayPal.
In order to maximize the checkout page experience for your customers, provide additional payment options and try to provide all checkout details on the same page. Here are some additional payment gateways that you can use:
- Authorize.net
- Amazon Pay
- Google Checkout
- Stripe
- Masterpass
- 2Checkout
- PaySimple
The Baymard Institute study into the top 50 e-commerce checkout pages gives you a clear idea of how a checkout page should be.
3. Putting up advertisements: The TOI story
If you visit the Indian newspaper major The Times of India (TOI), the first thing you see is a completely unintuitive, non-relevant, and non-user-friendly full-page ad. After the ad redirects you to the homepage, you see close to 30 image, video, and text ads strewn all over the place.
There are a large number of videos also. You cannot watch a single one of them without watching an ad that can’t be skipped.
Besides these, there are movie trailers, irrelevant links, and content from sister sites (music, TV shows, jobs, courses, etc.) More than half of the links on the homepage redirect you to a sponsor or a sister site.
Forget user experience — it’s the usability that is at stake here.
TOI has gadget listings on its homepage, but too many advertisements ultimately results in low conversion rates for these products.
Regular visitors to TOI train themselves to focus only on the tiny box at the top labeled “Top News Stories” and another one below labeled “Latest News.” That’s where you have what you want — news. Most visitors ignore the rest of the website.
Among e-commerce sites, you can see ads on Walmart, which serves geographically targeted Google ads.
Advertisements don’t augment your UX and only serve the purpose of moving your users out. So, if your plan is to get high conversion rates, avoid ads.
4. Aiming for high YSlow score without real content optimization
A normal WordPress blog using a free theme and not too much content on the homepage could achieve a higher YSlow score than a professional blog such as TechCrunch. But the professional blog may still provide better user experience. How so?
Your YSlow score is dependent on your final loading time, among other factors, not just the time it takes for the user-facing content to load on the browser.
Sites like TC load its user-facing content faster, usually within 2 seconds. And they use several technologies, including a CDN, server software such as Nginx, and caching engines such as Varnish, to achieve the speed.
Professional blogs may also have optimized HTML that loads much faster. The background scripts and other elements may take longer to load, deteriorating the YSlow score, but the user essentially has already seen the entire website.
In essence, a high YSlow score may not always correlate to fast content loading, so it has less to do with better UX.
In the following image, Quicksprout loaded the user-facing content faster than TechCrunch and ZoomOwl, but ZoomOwl still has the highest YSlow rating. TechCrunch showed up on the browser within three seconds, but took the longest to finish loading the entire content.
You need to have your site loading within 3 seconds for impatient mobile users today. Any more delay could cost you dearly in conversions. A few front-end and back-end optimizations can help your site load much faster.
5. Not following accepted standards and intuition in design
Google Merchandise Store is the e-commerce site run by the search giant to sell its branded merchandise across all of its brands—Google, YouTube, Android, and Waze.
The first thing you notice about this well-converting ecommerce site is its simplicity and basic intuition. As soon as you enter the site, it shows you a map and asks you to select your location. When the store loads, you will notice how it abides by the accepted standards:
- Simple menu with all the items grouped in categories
- Search box at the top right
- Cart icon at the top right next to the search box with the number of items on it
- Customer support number, email address, shipping information, FAQ, and other relevant information on the footer
- Ability to check out with a Google account or as a guest
This is a very simple and accurately built e-commerce site. It has all the elements in place and there is no promotional extravaganza, save for a “Sale” menu item in red at the top.
The diagram below shows the accepted standard for an ecommerce site today.
If you follow the accepted standards of design, your users will feel comfortable on your site.
6. Not providing enough visual information
Your product is somewhere in the warehouse — not in front of the user. So, your customers can’t touch or feel it. Hence, show them plenty of photos and videos.
Product photos should be captured from all angles. Also, ensure the photos are of the highest possible quality with the absolute best lighting. Ecommerce giants invest in professional photographers to take the snaps that really sell.
Check out Bang & Olufsen, which provides high-quality, multi-angle photographs of its products in transparent background and a few images with the product placed as part of a home décor.
By the way, having photos alone won’t be enough. You may create rich product videos providing the usage instructions of the product. They can really help bring more conversions.
7. Not having breadcrumbs at the top
If you have a site with a lot of product categories, people need more than a menu at the top to be able to find their way through your site—enter breadcrumbs!
SmartInsights Ecommerce Conversion Rates study of 2018 finds difficult navigation to be a user experience issue causing non-conversion 19.3% of the time.
Check out Amazon.com, eBay, or Walmart. They allow the visitors to get back to your previous page effortlessly with those tiny breadcrumbs organized in this format:
Department > Sub-department > Item category > Item
In addition to breadcrumbs, implement a progress bar on the checkout page. Users should be able to go back and make any modifications as well.
8. Search fails to rank the selling products
I wouldn’t call Amazonthe best-designed and most intuitive of all e-commerce sites. In fact, personally I would love to see a few improvements there.
Having said that, Amazon indubitably leads the ecommerce scene with a “redonkulous” conversion rate of over 74% for Prime users and 13% for non-Prime, while most of the industry’s conversion rates top at 3%. This has a lot to do with the trust in the brand and parameters other than the site UX itself.
One key contributor to this huge conversion rate is that universal product search box stretched across the top of the Amazon website.
Every visitor to Amazon types in what he wants in that box, and Amazon is able to bring up the most relevant and most conversion-optimized results to him.
Ranking in Amazon is wildly different from ranking in Google. Google “sells” information, but Amazon sells products.
Amazon is least bothered about uniqueness in product descriptions and hundreds of backlinks. Amazon will rank a product as long as it has high conversion. And sellers achieve high conversion with a compelling description, great images, keywords on title and description, and as much product details as possible.
So, for your ecommerce site to provide the best user experience, have a good search feature in place that ranks the relevant, high-conversion products to your visitors.
9. Poor sorting & filtering options
Your user would want to sort the product listings every which way.
Most ecommerce sites provide a few sorting options, but they could add much more than that for better UX.
For instance, Amazon allows you to sort by price, customer reviews, and newest arrivals. EBay allows sorting by time, price, and distance. Walmart allows you to sort by best sellers, price, rating, and newest arrivals.
Filters on the products are also equally important. Most e-commerce giants place the product filters on the left-hand side, before the product details.
The filters will give you several options to narrow down to the product that you want to buy. Also, the filters differ based on the product in question: Clothes have different types of filters than smartphones.
Providing an intuitive interface to filter is also important. It’s much better to give the user the choice to select all the filters in one shot and then apply them, so that the page reloads only once. But sites like Amazon provide filter checkboxes and immediately reload the page when a user checks a filter.
Reloading the entire page for every filter could deteriorate UX a little bit, unless your site loads exceptionally fast. Even with that, AJAX-based product listing could be even better for UX.
10. Going frugal on product details
Ecommerce sites are far from physical stores, where you can look at a product from all angles, try it on, touch and feel the material, and see the size and fit in real time.
For much improved user experience and better conversion, you have to provide all relevant details of the product.
Relevant details depend on the product itself. For clothes, measurement, color options, fit, material, etc., are relevant details.
For a laptop, the RAM, processor, warranty period, return/exchange details, etc., are relevant. Provide all the details in the product description for the buyer to make an informed decision.
Sellers on eBay do this well. In order to improve product conversion rate, eBay sellers provide maximum details on the product pages. Only those sellers make high conversion rate on the competitive eBay platform.
It is also very important to provide stock details. Nobody wants to check out the product and go to the final payment stage and then realize that the product is no longer in stock.
In addition, the most essential information for checkout should be right above the “add to cart” button. For instance, a pair of jeans cannot be checked out without selecting the size, quantity, and color. Those options should be above the button.
11. Not providing in-depth shipping information
Reasons for abandoning carts in the U.S. 2016-2017 published by eMarketer is a very insightful research into shopping cart abandonment. It identifies expensive shipping, no free shipping, not providing shipping costs, slow shipping, etc., as individual reasons for cart abandonment.
Among the top eight cart abandonment reasons, four are related to shipping.
So, provide your users with incredibly detailed information on shipping. The costs, time taken, options for faster delivery, etc., are extremely important.
12. Not communicating well enough
The buyer needs detailed communication about his purchases, and through all possible channels.
Immediately after checkout, a text message and an email should be triggered confirming the order.
Then regular updates on shipment, transit, and delivery should be provided through text and email notifications to the user. Before delivery, a message should be sent with the delivery agent’s phone number.
In addition, Amazon provides the option to “leave the item with a neighbor.” This is an additional convenience that highly improves the user experience.
Customer support is another form of communication, and it should include phone, chat, and email support options. The user should be able to get in touch with a support agent very quickly and on demand.
Conclusion
User experience is important for all kinds of sites, not only ecommerce sites. And there are sites that do it well.
When it comes to designing for the top dollar, invest in a user experience designer. According to Roman Nurik, design advocate at Google, “Investment in UX is often the difference between businesses that grow and those that sputter.”
According to NEA’s Future of Design in Startups Survey, great UX design leads to the following benefits:
- Higher sales
- Better customer retention
- Improved customer engagement
- Faster product cycles
So, to dramatically improve your conversion rate, invest in UX.
How will you improve your own website UX?
12 Obvious User Experience Mistakes That Could Ruin Your Conversion Rate
We’re in the digital age, with thousands of gadgets at our disposal: digital television, tablets, smartphones, apps, social networks and e-commerce, just to mention a handful.
A few years ago, before digital revolution came about, the work of a marketer was to create catchy and captivating ads for print media, television and billboards. But the digital age compelled marketers to evolve and take advantage of technology to distribute their messages.
This may sound quite overwhelming compared with previous strategies, but the opposite is actually true: the digital age has brought with it tons of data, which marketers can leverage to make better strategic marketing decisions through more accurate insights. Consumers are therefore served more useful content through ads, thanks to better clarity about what they want.
his is where data visualization steps in.
Hop on our innovative data visualization train and take a ride through the many different opportunities dataviz provides you with.
1. Why Data Visualization Is Important To Convey Your Message With Marketing Data
These days, we’re inundated with information. Everyone’s suffering from data overload, and many people feel like they’re drowning in information.
Compared to what people in the 1980s had to deal with, we receive 5 times more information – the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day.
It’s interesting how an intangible thing like “information” can have such a concrete and powerful impact on people.
Some neuroscientists explain that it’s because our brains were designed to cope with the amount of information we were receiving thousands of years ago in a world that was slower.
However, technology and innovation have developed too quickly for our brains to adapt.
The results are brain fatigue in the middle of the day and a general overwhelmed feeling.
When we take a closer look at our brain – the very one organ in charge of dealing with all that information – we see that it has a highly visual nature.
Indeed, 90% of the information transferred is visual. Likewise, studies show that people remember 80% of what they see and do, but only 30% what they read. Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.
All of this has a simple, natural explanation: The eyes are like little cameras acting as a physical extension of our brain.
That same brain has half of its capacities dedicated to the visual function, directly or indirectly.
It turns out that we are designed in a way that makes dataviz a great strategy for marketers in general!
Marketing dashboards give you the capacity to understand and leverage the value of your data, which is an extraordinary asset!
As a marketer, you are manipulating thousands of data points every day. Opting for a visualization instead of a plain “reading” is more likely to have a stronger impact.
It’s also obviously easier to spot trends and patterns with a visual chart than with a spreadsheet.
They facilitate the recognition of relationships between various variables and let you see what would otherwise remain unearthed.
Finally, more of our brain is activated when we listen to stories. Providing a narrative when presenting your data will engage your audience all the more.
And this is how we bring data storytelling along data visualization – but for the moment, let’s focus on the visualization part and develop it.
Telling the story behind data relies on strong foundations – the data itself. It is important to understand and clean your data and to understand what you are trying to take away from it.
Let’s delve a little deeper into the mechanisms behind data visualization and the steps to prepare and produce a perfect, effective, and actionable dataviz.
2. How To Build A Data Visualization That Focuses On The Needs Of Your Audience
Knowing Your Audience
First and foremost, you need to define your audience: who are you creating your data visualization for? What kind of people or professionals are they, what do they do and what are they looking for?
Do not be exhaustive here: outline in detail who you will present it to and their goals.
The questions that your CEO asks and what she or he needs to know is drastically different to what your teams need to know, which is different to what a stakeholder wants to know.
Each and every member of your audience is looking to gain profit for himself or herself.
It’s important to put their goals first in order to meet their expectations, gain trust, and more practically, determine the line of your story.
Once you have answered these questions about your audience and spent some time in their shoes, think about the information they will need to meet their expectations.
Answering Their Needs
As a start, you need to select the right data.
Let’s say your audience is composed of investors or the CFOs of your company allocating budgets every year.
They will need to see metrics that will tell them if they invested in the right product, or if they allocate the right budget and that it generated profit. These metrics could be:
- Number of customers originated by marketing: it gives everyone an idea of how much of the customer base is driven by the marketing department. It’s important to underline this fact as marketing is not only limited to brand awareness, but also drive prospects to the sales department.
- Funnel conversion rate: it helps in understanding how effective your efforts in quality leads generation are and move them to the end of the funnel.
- Return on marketing investment: of course, the very one metric they want to see is how much profit is generated with each dollar spent.
Now, if your audience is composed of your team members who are focused on SEO activities, you want to display advanced Google Analytics dashboards or social media metrics.
It’s indeed crucial for them to see how their efforts are converting, and how they are performing. These metrics could be:
- Traffic Sources: Traffic is one of the most important measures of your website’s success. Understanding where your visitors are coming from and how is key to see if your focus your efforts on the right channel (organic, referral, paid, social, or direct).
- Page tracking: You want to show how your visitors are behaving on your pages. How long they stay before leaving (session duration), how many pages they see before leaving (average pages per session), or how high your bounce rate becomes. This helps you to identify the best converting landing pages for your different marketing campaigns.
Finally, if your audience is the top management of your company, you will not deep dive into details and specific metrics like the previous ones.
Providing a big picture of the performance and the strategy is recommended. Metrics displayed could be:
- Marketing spend evolution for different channels over the year, quarter or month, and how much revenue they have generated.
- Total marketing profit, and more specifically the profit per acquisition.
All these are simple examples and a non-exhaustive list of what you can use to answer the needs of your audience, depending on who they are.
Selecting the Right Data Visualization
We are getting to the purpose of that article. Now that the right metrics for the right audience are selected, you need to find a way to visualize them efficiently.
And this is where the problem often lies.
Keep in mind that different views answer different questions, and different charts tell different stories: you should choose them with care!
Let’s go through some examples to illustrate that:
The line chart: shows an evolution, a trend, an acceleration, or the volatility of a variable. The line chart can be “turned” into an area chart if you decided to fill with color the area underneath the line.
These area charts can also be “stacked,” like stacked bar charts, which portray a part-to-whole relationship.
Tip: avoid piling up too many lines. That decreases comprehension. Likewise, stacking up or coloring areas that overlap each other will bring more confusion to the chart.
The bar chart: can be horizontal, vertical, or stacked. Like the line, it can show an evolution, but it’s more useful when you need to compare variables and rank them.
Tip: if you want to show an evolution, use a vertical (column) chart, as time is expressed from left to right. Horizontal will not work. Stacked charts are good to express a part-to-whole relationship.
The pie chart: the very infamous pie chart, used and abused over time. It became such a cliché that an app was even developed to generate memes of it.
But the pie chart can be pretty effective. For instance, to give a rough impression of a metric where the exact figure is not the most important, but the idea of the proportion is what matters.
For visualization, pie charts are actually pretty efficient as they give a direct view of a part-to-whole relationship. This is why many instruments have circular dials (clocks, speedometers, etc.).
Tip: do not use for precise comparison with many variables. If there is 1% difference between two variables, a pie chart won’t display it well. Likewise, too many variables on the pie make it less effective.
The gauge chart: also known as “speedometers,” they are easy to digest. However, they can be used to display only one value in a quantitative context – no comparison to another variable is possible unless you make two individual gauge charts.
Tip: only use it to display one data point. Cannot be used to express a trend, an evolution, or comparison.
The spider chart: also known as “radars,” spider charts are comparative charts. When you have multivariate data with over three distinct quantitative variables, it is a good way to easily display it.
In other words, you want to evaluate two or more things that have three or more characteristics.
Tip: not possible to use it to express time, a trend, or an evolution.
The map: maps are good to display geographical data. It’s important to bring added value in a readable way.
Tip: stuffing the map with red dots will not bring anything other than confusion. Be careful with the way you display your data on it.
The scatter plots: this chart is very useful when you look for a correlation using a very large dataset. These charts are used to show how much one variable is affected by another – the relationship between these two variables is called the correlation.
Tip: it’s a useful graph when you want to show data where each instance has at least two metrics. Adding a trend line can also help.
3. Bring Your Dataviz Together To Create A Powerful And Convincing Dashboard
You have now picked the right data visualization that answers the right questions for your audience. You cannot stop after such a good work, and should now bring all your charts together to create the overview telling your data story: a beautiful dashboard.
However, as with any story, there are some tips and tricks and best practices to follow to make it the most attractive and understandable possible.
Since there’s no need to reinvent the wheel every day, here are some guidelines you can follow to help you out when building your dashboard.
Dashboard Design Best Practices
Less is more
We have come a long way since 19th-century poet Robert Browning first stated that ‘less is more’ – however, this is an advice that we still like to follow.
The notion that clarity and simplicity lead to good design hasn’t been as strong and anchored in our western societies as it is today. The minimalist movement and design style indeed takes over everything, from tech products to clothes.
But it will not be difficult to implement since you have already chosen only relevant metrics for your audience!
An example of data visualization overload is the chart released by Calculated Risk, which illustrated the percent of job losses relative to peak employment.
Not only do the axes have unusual measures (usually time is displayed on the x-axis, while here the years are the variables on the graph and the quantity of months is on the x-axis), but it’s impossible to track the lines individually, let alone compare them to each other:
No data clutter
In a similar vein, designing your data visualization to avoid clutter will greatly improve it.
To optimize the impact of your data on your audience, you can organize it in a way that appeals to their cognition.
The Gestalt School of Psychology wrote a great guide that identifies the forms and characteristics of clutter, with specific rules of the organization of perceptual scene – in other words, the order creation in the context of visual stimulation.
The principle of proximity, for instance, dictates that human have a tendency to group elements together based on their location (their “proximity”).
Perception can be manipulated with well placed, grouped data.
Another principle is the similarity: circles go with circles and squares with squares. Humans naturally group comparable elements together.
If you have several green rectangular on your visualization, your audience expects them to be grouped together.
Data visualization is also impacted by subconscious desire to achieve visual order. The information consumption of your audience (in western societies) will start from the upper left corner down in an “F” pattern.
So, diagonal elements are not really welcome on a dashboard.
Here’s an example of a chart with non-intuitive data arrangement, which makes it difficult for the reader to connect visuals with values – and the 3D, even if it “looks cool,” overlaps other data items:
Provide context
Always provide a broader context for data. Anyone in the room can then clearly articulate its background and where you want to head it to.
If your data was gathered online through Google Analytics and that you focused on one specific channel, or segment, at a certain time period, it is important to mention it.
Likewise, if your marketing data was collected offline through street-survey or cold-calling, it’s worth mentioning it since the results will be interpreted in a different light.
Another crucial point when you present your insights is the jargon.
When reporting to investors, they might not be familiar with what a GA cohort analysis refers to, or what is behind the channel-names of user acquisition.
Make sure you have a jargon-free dashboard to onboard everyone, and do not to overuse technical words. Adaptability is key!
Don’t forget about the color theory
One thing that marketers should be even more aware than any other professional, is the color theory.
There are a lot of comprehensives guides out there that will help you with which color works best for what, and which emotions they trigger or work on.
A common mistake is to use highly-saturated colors too often.
Anything intense draws attention, but if your whole dashboard is filled with intense colors the effect is too overwhelming for the reader: they don’t know what to read first and what is more important.
Using the same colors for the same items of your dashboard makes it consistent and reduces the reader’s mental effort of comprehension.
Never go for random colors with your items, especially when you display them together in a group (as we have seen earlier in this article, to avoid data clutter).
You can also use graduation of a color to display intensity – it is particularly relevant if you use a map chart, showing the concentration of a variable in different regions. In other words, dark red shows “a lot of X” and light-red expresses “a little of X.”
Here’s an example of a poor use of colors, with a gradient of blue in the background that does not add anything but chaos to the visualization, clashing with the bright yellow and red that are too intense – and that gives it a general feeling of a “cheap” dataviz!
Make it personal
Directly linked to the previous best practice on colors, is the customization of your dashboard.
This will add a tailor-made touch that will engage your audience even more.
Have fun and be creative
Last but not least, the authenticity.
Giving a genuine feeling to your dashboard that will echo your audience is easy when you let yourself be a bit creative – we’re not telling you to forget all what we just said, but you can pick what makes sense to you and let go some creativity and fun in your presentation.
Illustrations of Marketing Dashboard Best Practices
Now that we have gone through all the steps to realize an outstanding marketing dashboard for your specific audience, let’s illustrate it with real, professional dashboards following these best practices!
You can easily connect your different data sources and work on them to create such visualizations with an online dashboard tool.
Let’s start with a dashboard that can precisely answer the initial situation you were immersed in the introduction of that article.
Your CEO asks you, Chief Marketing Officer, to report on the marketing activities efficiently so that every stakeholder around the table has a clear picture of what is happening.
Using such dashboard will perfectly address their requirements, as it provides an overview of the most important marketing KPIs you track.
It gives the overview they need, and valuable material to make strategic decisions: the total revenue generated, the total spend and its evolution over the year, the profit the company made thanks to marketing and the return on investment.
The content is relevant and actionable, so let’s have a look at the general style: the color theory is respected, as they are harmonized and stay in the same gradient of blue – no clash making it difficult for the eye to read.
The metrics are arranged in an efficient and organized way, with each color gathering metrics for each category: revenue generation, costs, and profit.
No data clutter, clear distribution leading from one matter to the next, and ending with the final, important bottom-line: ROI.
This dashboard presents the perfect report on all your marketing performance data related to different paid campaigns at a glance.
This is ideal to report to the PPC Manager asking for insights on the various initiative you have undertaken and how well you did for each.
How much you spent on each compared to the budget, and how much each performed compared to one another. That will help in planning and executing goals better, but also in budgeting for future marketing efforts.
Concerning the outlook, once again we see that the global layout is simple, clear and efficient.
The campaigns’ data in the center of the dashboard is contextualized with the left column, providing an overview of various metrics that are then compared for each campaign – and each of them has a specific color.
Last but not least, this dashboard is more detail-oriented with specific data related to website traffic. It is not directed to investors or outside stakeholders for instance.
Such a dashboard needs a lot of data to make sense, but it remains clear and understandable, avoiding the data overload trap.
This is a marketing dashboard that will allow you to keep an eye on all major web analytics with ease, from the most basic information (like the number of visitors over time) to more elaborate metrics (where they are coming from, and how they convert).
The snapshot on the top gives an ideal overview of the KPIs that are further detailed underneath.
The layout is coherent, the colors harmonized, and visuals are used to easily catch what the metrics are saying: a clock to illustrate the visits’ time duration, a flag for the goal conversion rate, a human icon for the number of visits, etc.
The use of visual is, as we explained in the first part of that article, essential for a rapid and easy comprehension.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you now know more about the different steps to take to create outstanding data visualizations.
From audience definition and targeting, to picking the right metrics and the right charts, you should now understand better how to create professional data visualizations that will convey the right information behind your marketing data.
Next time you are asked to report on your activities, you will have everything in hands to make the best impression on your audience!
About the Author: Mona is a passionate writer about data analytics and innovative business reporting techniques. She is working as Content Manager for datapine, in the bustling startup landscape of Berlin, Germany. Try datapine’s smart dashboarding solution for free with this 14-day trial.
