Visual Analytics in Tokopedia Data Team
Working in a major tech company means every decision-making activity involves enormous data before business direction could be set. In doing so, Tokopedia Data Team is the front-liner who explores many hypothesis and analyses through visual analytics to bring valuable insights and improve every business line that Tokopedia has.
On this occasion, we would like to share 10 charts that we find interesting and use occasionally in assisting the development of business and products, along with its difficulty level if you feel like to apply in related work case.
Easy: 5–30 Minutes
Medium: 30 Minutes — 2 Hours
Hard: More than 2 Hours
- Sparkline — Easy
Best Use Case: Monitor team performance in a datetime basis.
In Tokopedia, it is common to see this chart helps every team to understand the sense of business growth in a glimpse in terms of daily, weekly, or monthly trend. Especially, in high level where details and number do not matter.
2. HeatMap — Easy
Best Use Case: Illustrate Pattern in Datetime Basis
Tokopedia has plenty of interesting promotion to offer to its users in their platform. One of the evaluation in every campaign is to analyze the burn rate or promo code usage throughout the campaign period. The color gradation tells how close the value is to either side of edge. With this chart, it is easier to understand the pattern by looking at the color distribution (from light to dark)
3. Targeted Horizontal Bar Chart — Easy
Best Use Case: Progress on Multiple KPI Target
A simple choice to start with when business users need to be aware of the team’s progress as compared to the target setup at the start of the period. Numbers of registered merchants and registered users are few examples of metrics that has its own specified target, which horizontal bar chart represents in a simple yet informative way.
4. Funnel — Easy
Best use case: Illustrate Stages in Business Process
By using funnel chart, conversion from one stage to another can be easily reflected. In e-commerce industry, customers’ journey start from checking-out a transaction, make payment, and finally complete their transaction is important to be monitored. As the first stage of funnel tells the potential number of buying customer, maximizing the conversion from each stage could bring huge business advantage, as it means fewer passive users.
5. Scatter Plot — Easy
Best use case: Compare or Show Relationship between Two Measures
With various categories of products in Tokopedia, one insight that can be generated is the personas of customer who are typically interested in specific category. This insight could then be utilized to plan a promotional campaign towards certain segment of customer criteria.
6. Waffle — Medium
Best Use Case: Show Percentage or Portion
Waffle is another interesting chart to visualize percentage of achievement, where each block represents 1 percent. For instance, one of the metrics that Tokopedia has is Success Rate of Customer Transaction. By using waffle chart, we can understand how many of the transactions that actually completed by customers.
7. Radial Bar — Medium
Best Use Case: Show Different Value from Multiple Categories that Equally Starts from 0
In Tokopedia’s previous publication in Tableau Public, where the team introduced a historical event of Youth Pledge that took place 90 years ago, radial bar chart was used to describe how various local and international languages had been involved to the development of Bahasa Indonesia.
8. Bump — Medium
Best Use Case: Ranking Changes Over Time
When it comes to show ranking of the best selling categories of products, or top sellers with the highest number of transactions in Tokopedia, it is done by using Bump chart as it enables a proper visualization of the position changes over time.
9. Sankey — Hard
Best Use Case: Visualize Transfers of Data between Stages/Processes
Sankey diagram illustrates the stream of data between stages proportionally to the flow quantity as the line gets thicker representing the greater amount of data involved. Sankey works best on showing major source and output of a process. In celebrating Asian Games on last August 2018, Tokopedia BI Team managed to learn and implement Sankey Diagram to describe how Indonesia has been a strong contender with its consistent achievements in Badminton field.
10. Connected Map/Network — Hard
Best Use Case: Reveal Pattern through Distribution
One of the practical example analysis utilizing Connected Map is to learn the distribution of transaction done by millions of users across thousands of location in Indonesia. Multiple measures can be applied in the chart, such as shipping time or distance travelled, and it can all be represented in the chart by using different representation: color gradation of the spot, size of the circle itself, or the thickness of the connectors.
By doing so, further analysis on figuring out the pattern can be obtained just by looking at the visualization.
Those are top 10 of visual analytics that are being used by Tokopedia Data Team, where we are keen to learn more interesting charts to provide valuable insights and gain business advantage from tons of data that Tokopedia has. How about you? Which chart do you find the most helpful and fond of? Share your thoughts in comment below.
