We live in a visual world. The information we are presented with increasingly contains visual elements. And that makes sense, because compared to text, we find visual information much more attractive to ingest, our brain processes it faster and it sticks better.
Application in enterprise software
Even in the world of business software, information is increasingly presented visually. Think Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) displayed in graphs and bar or pie charts. Some applications provide complete management dashboards for real-time monitoring of business performance. And resource planning is increasingly done graphically; clear, easy to customize with drag & drop and fully integrated with other modules of the system.
Three benefits of visual business intelligence
It is not without reason that business information is increasingly presented visually to the user. It has some important advantages:
- More pleasant to work with: pieces of text and bare figures can be quite valuable, but it is much more pleasant to see the same information in e.g. a dashboard.
- Work faster: we absorb the information in a pie chart or graph in a split second. That advantage seems minimal, but it saves a considerable amount of time during a workday.
- Better memorization: we can store visual information in our brain much better than boring texts and numbers.
Big numbers
Visual information is especially useful with the "big numbers"; the numbers on which employees base their important decisions and which are frequently seen in management reports. But sometimes you just want to drill down to the numbers to look at, say, that one sales order. Good business software makes both possible: visual information that helps make decisions, as well as the ability to zoom in to a level of detail.
Philip van Kemenade is a marketer at Dysel and has daily contact with end users of software.
