Dashboards

Visualizing Survey Results with Dashboards

A critical phase of the research process is the presentation of results to clients. This is typically done in a variety of different ways, including the use of tables and charts in reports and slide presentations. Using MarketSight is a great way to analyze your data and generate those traditional deliverables.

One of the more accessible and more engaging ways to present research results is through the use of online dashboards. Done well, dashboards provide simple tools for viewers to immerse themselves in the research findings in a way that is visual and interactive but requires no special training. Try this sample interactive dashboard.

MarketSight Dashboards can help you present your findings in a way that no other static medium can.

Just what is a Dashboard?

A dashboard is a collection of different visual elements -- usually charts -- arranged on a single web page, providing a summary of the most important results or findings related to a particular subject. Dashboards can be connected to live data that is automatically updated in real-time, or based on a completed survey project or other finite datasets. Dashboards should be accessible on any internet-capable device anytime and anywhere, providing a significant advantage over traditional static reports.

The example below shows a dashboard containing four charts relating to a particular product line, showing market share, brand awareness, and several other metrics. This single dashboard provides an instant view of all the key performance indicators. 

Dashboard example - click on the image below to go to an interactive dashboard

 

Interactive Charts Are More Engaging

Being able to see these results graphically and control how the informaiton is displayed is a major advantage of dashboards over static charts and reports.  Dashboards bring the data to life and enable a level of analysis that can be performed by anyone, regardless of expertise, potentially yielding important new insights for the business. While viewing the different charts in this sample dashboard, a user may want to see the data in a different way. Perhaps:

• sliced by region or by country
• showing different products
• showing more than 12 months of data
• showing a quarterly breakdown instead of monthly

By using an interactive chart in this dashboard, you can provide the user with those options, as shown below. 

 

Enabling Your Organization vs. Hiring a Consulting Firm

Once you've determined that dashboards will enhance your ability to share the results of your research with colleagues and clients, you have two basic options for creating dashboards. The big question is whether you should select an analysis and reporting platform that includes the tools that will enable you to create dashboards with your current team or engage a specialty consulting firm that will design a custom dashboard for each new project, for each client, at considerable expense.

We have some definite views on this, but we think that most companies -- large and small -- will gain a significant advantage by having the ability to create and publish dashboards from any dataset, for any client, at any time, with no incremental costs, by using an integrated data analysis and reporting solution that has dashboard design and deployment capabilities that are fully integrated.

 

One Complete Solution

If you do conclude that your organization would benefit from having one complete solution to work with any dataset to create crosstabs, perform statistical analysis, create charts, export results to Microsoft Office applications such as Excel and PowerPoint, and of course, create dynamic dashboards, then the dashboard features of such a solution should meet the following requirements:

• Easy to use by any researcher or analyst with no special training required
• Flexible with many options to create custom dashboards for any dataset and any audience
• Connected to live data that is automatically updated with new responses or new data
• Simple to publish and control online access to dashboards
• Accessible to other team members for collaboration
• Accessible on PCs, Macs, and tablets
• Able to provide free access to individuals viewing the dashboards

 

MarketSight Dashboards

The MarketSight dashboard solution delivers on all of these requirements and many more, making it a natural extension of your analysis and reporting workflow, enabling you to create compelling interactive dashboards from existing charts and crosstabs in just minutes. These dashboards can be shared with other MarketSight users and non-users absolutely free, on your own web site or ours.

Creating a dashboard is as simple as dragging a MarketSight chart or crosstab onto the canvas and selecting a few formatting options. From there, you can share the dashboard with anyone, including non-MarketSight users. They'll always be connected to the live dashboard on the server, so as data is updated or if you make changes to the dashboard, all viewers will see those changes automatically. Dashboards can even be exported to PowerPoint to enhance your final report.

 

Learn More About MarketSight Dashboards

The Dashboards and Interactive Charts features are included with MarketSight's Enterprise Edition, so if you're already a customer, we encourage you to take advantage of this great feature.

If you are not yet among MarketSight's thousands of users, we invite you to learn about dashboards for yourself first-hand by signing up for a free 30-day trial of MarketSight. Use the sample data we provide or upload your own data and do work on a current project.