What can qualitative researchers learn from big data dashboards?

Data is big these days. It’s everywhere and everyone is obsessed with it. Every minute of every day we create:

• More than 204 million email messages
• Over 2 million Google search queries
• 48 hours of new YouTube videos
• 684,000 bits of content shared on Facebook
• More than 100,000 tweets
• $272,000 spent on e-commerce
• 3,600 new photos shared on Instagram
• Nearly 350 new WordPress blog posts

Source: Domo

Companies small and large are generating sales, consumer and behavioral data at exponential rates. Gartner believes enterprise data will grow 650 percent in the next 5 years. These statistics are astounding. Therefore, keeping track of this data and making it usable is big business.

One way of dealing with all of this data are dashboards. Dashboards are a way of presenting a lot of data on a single page with a real-time user interface. As the metaphor implies, dashboards make the user feel in control through multiple measures and interactive data. Big players like IBM and others like iDashboards are providing dashboard services to help clients make sense of the unending torrent of data. For example, one click can cut data to observe changes in sales in the past several years versus recent quarters or to show website effectiveness by age group, geography, page location or device. It’s a wonderful way to navigate through the quantitative clutter and help make decisions.

As a qualitative researcher, I can’t help but wonder what can we learn from this kind of quantitative data presentation?

With this, we must start asking: How can qualitative data be more interactive? How can it be more real-time? How can we present qualitative data to make the user feel more in control? What would a qualitative dashboard look like? How can qualitative researchers help clients understand the meaning of the quantitative data found in dashboards?

Answering these questions will help put our clients in the driver’s seat moving forward.