Presenting Data In a way that it make sense
We live in a complex world with diverse people, firms having their own view of each and everything they do, see and accomplish. We see day to day events which can vary from getting up early in the morning to stock markets crashing and what not. All these are data that’s happening right in front of our eyes and data can be anything and everything, so we need a system of understanding the data from different diverse people’s perspective and funnel it to one neutral platform so that it can be understood by everyone and make sense of the data and try to use it for adopting ourselves for more effective and efficient way of using it for more productivity in terms of everything we try to accomplish in our day to day life.
To capture data and make use of it for any random reason, we need to first come up with a way to interpret the data and design a kind of model around it to make sure it’s understandable by laymen easily and it should make sense on how to use the data that’s been visually presented to the end user.
To present the data first we have to analyze the data and break the big chunk of data into small pieces of it so that we can make sense of the whole bunch of data to represent it in a meaningful way. So what is data analysis? Data analysis is the process of developing answers to questions through the examination and interpretation of data, the first step towards analyzing the data would be identifying the issues and getting to know the suitable data availability, taking a call on which method is most efficient on addressing the area of issues, applying the relevant methods to get the results and communicating the derived results. Data is something we express observations in a usable format.
Let me give you a small example for understanding data and using it solve a issue, our team had a task to develop/design a tool that relates to entrepreneurship & poverty, so we decided to choose assessing the issue that involves food and set out ourselves to interview different kind of people who are connected to food in one or the other way, be it from a chef to a food business owner. I chose to interview particularly the set of people who owns a food truck business and sell healthy food to customers in their day to day life. So I prepared a set of questions to interview the users and went on to get some insights on how they go about their business, so as I went on interviewing the users to collect data that can be used to design a tool, I found out about many issues the food truck owners faced on a daily basis, the main concern was they had very little customer base to connect with, they faced lot of issues in terms of connecting with their customers and their business was limited to couple of block where they parked their food truck or max to one single neighborhood , another interesting fact about the food truck business is they like to sell their food fresh and if the food they prepared for the day was not sold entirely, they trash the food which is a sad thing of wasting food and also a loss in terms of business.
They had very limited resource to expand their business and they couldn’t plan their business efficiently on a day to day basis because of no access to data, so based on the research and inputs form the users and the kind of data availability, I came with an idea of pulling out data about healthy food stores in Philly and also the most foot traffic area in Philly and present in a format that food truck people can use it not only to expand their business but also plan their business effectively and efficiently. So the idea was creating an app for the users to connect them with healthy stores in Philadelphia and also present them the access to data of high foot traffic in and around Philly. One could ask why a mobile app, why not a web app. The sole reason for a mobile app instead of a web app was simply because from the user research I found out that 85% of the food truck owners had easy access to a smart phone compared to a desktop and they were familiar with usage of exchange/ sharing apps like Uber, Lyft etc. So it would be easy for them to access this tool on their smart phones on the go compared to using this tool on a web-based medium. With this idea in mind I had to come up with a way of presenting data to the users (in this case food truck owners) in a way that they could easily understand it and use it more effectively, efficiently and most important meaningfully, so I came up with this idea
where one could login to the app with their food truck details and they could directly search the number of healthy stores present in neighborhoods of their choice and interact with them about their business or also they can plan their business for the day by entering their travel path so that the app shows exactly how many healthy stores are available along their travel path and where is the most foot traffic present in the path they are travelling. So this way they could expand their customer base and plan their business on a day to day basis with exactly knowing what quantity to prepare and plan on how they are going to sell their food without wasting majority part of it. After creating a wireframe for this app, presented this to the food truck owners and 70% of the users were able to figure out how to use this app for majority part of it without me explaining how this app works and they were excited
about this idea of them expanding their customer base and having access to most foot traffic area within Philly so that they can move their truck and sell more food in that particular area on that particular day. So this is just a small and brief example of how one can analyze the data and communicate the derived information in a way that the end user can understand and make optimal use of it to get the desired result.
