Blooming bar charts: The growth of the data visualization industry
Exploring data visualization industry trends for 2022.
Like a cultivated garden, the data visualization industry continues to blossom.
According to Mordor Intelligence, data visualizations were valued at USD 2.99 billion in 2020 and are projected to reach USD 5.17 billion by 2026. Premium brands rely on data visualizations to make sense of the data they have for informed strategic development.
Since Tim Brown’s re-popularization of design thinking at IDEO in the early 2000’s, design disciplines have played a larger role in the growth of graphic design based ROI and investment in technical roles in the data strategy fields. This growth has transformed the range of industries leveraging data visualizations and the ways visualizations are built and showcased.
Data visualization has become an integral part of multiple business functions including: financial planning presentations, educational training sessions, board meeting presentations, and marketing outreach. According to the Data Visualization Society’s 2021 survey, industries ranging from healthcare to marketing are expanding their integration of tools and presentation methods to deliver more custom insights. Diving into industry specific-trends for 2022, we are seeing an emergence of new tools based on the growth of data visualization applications. In addition, new career opportunities are blooming in design, research, academia, and journalism to deliver these unique areas of expertise.
Sprouting Spreadsheets
Industry experts leverage a multitude of tools to analyze, build and share their visual insights. Data visualization experts often dip into a wide net of tools to improve the design quality or organize information. Amongst the 30+ tools identified, the following application categories have emerged:
- Essentials: Fundamental building blocks for compiling and visualizing big data sets (Excel, Tableau, PowerPoint)
- Digging Deeper: Supplemental tools used to organize and brainstorm how to leverage data available. This ranged from sophisticated programming like Python, to basic pen and ink brainstorming
- Consulting: Supplemental visualization tools to expand on abilities to organize and present data in dashboard formats (Ggplot2, D3.js, Power Bi)
- Detective work: Supplemental data analyst programs used to dive into a wider net of data available online and web-based visualization techniques (R, Flourish, QGIS)
In 2021, we’ve seen a clearer divide in how data visualization tools are organized and used. Across the top ten identified data visualization industries in the Data Visualization 2021 Survey, the essential tools Excel(13.03%), Tableau(10.30%) and Powerpoint(8.23%) are exclusively the most popular in a data visualization experts’ toolkits.
Aside from these three tools, there is no set industry standards for data visualization tools at this time. This is likely because data visualization is utilized and developed differently depending on the industry. The expansion of industry adoption of data visualizations has widened the community of data visualization experts to become more inclusive of roles outside the original “pioneers” in the technology, analyst, and journalism spaces. Now the industries looking to cultivate data visualization capabilities have grown new opportunities for a wider range of roles including designers, marketers, consultants, and educators.
Regardless of the tools used, data visualizations can come from a wide range of career disciplines so long as the data is accurate, the format is engaging and the story is relevant. Balancing these three areas impacts how companies and experts invest their resources:
- Credible data can be hard to find organically: Solutions to the accessing of data (26.9%) is often higher in Finance, Healthcare, and Public Sectors because of HIPPA standards, lack of consumer information or its too niche.
- Not all data visualization experts are designers: Many of the more experienced professionals come from data science, analyst or journalism backgrounds with programming experience. Lack of design expertise (25.4%) is a barrier most professionals are struggling to overcome.
- Data visualization roles are hybrid: Anyone from a designer to an analyst may be able to analyze information into a visual story, and the output can range. There is no formal educational standard yet because it is still a growing field.
- Access to low cost tools matters: While there may be more sophisticated options of data visualization tools, investing in more than 3+ tools can be costly. Most professionals have access to Microsoft Office and Google Suite through their standard employer’s enterprise package. Therefore, it is no surprise that Excel and PowerPoint are more often favored.
Growing a Following
In 2021, there has been a clear curation of how data visualization insights are shared, and it is reflected in the consistent applications by industries. Consistently, Presentations (20.40%) and Documents and Reports (16.79%) are the most widely used formats of data visualizations, second only to Dashboards (20.94%) according to the DVS survey. From there, the method to share content comes down to either smaller-scale presentation for curated content (ie. emails to executive teams) or more public shareable methods (ie. sharing a public blog post on social media). There are a few likely reasons why we are seeing these trends:
- Interactive dashboards are becoming the industry standard: Dashboards are often among the top two ranked applications adapted most by industries. With a wide range of dashboard specific programs, there are more options for building and sharing dashboards. Developers and analysts in the IT, Private Sector, and Journalism fields often are more confident to navigate more sophisticated software solutions and leverage multiple programs to share insights.
- Conversational data visualizations are growing: Sharing information in documents or presentations is a popular and inclusive way to share information, especially since most businesses already invest in company-wide tools such as Google Suite and Microsoft Office. In light of COVID, when many companies transitioned to remote or hybrid workspaces, presentations rose in popularity as an easy way to walk through multiple data points. In a virtual office, a data visualization may be shared multiple ways, from a long form presentation on a remote video conference call to a high level static image in an email chain.
- Educational content is growing a following: Explainer data visualizations are becoming an academic necessity. For fields including academia, non profit, healthcare and finance, sharing out explainer-style data visualizations are a way to build consumer trust and build a learning-style following. Leveraging static web pages, social media, and email newsletters, data visualizations are becoming a friendly way to transform brands into household names.
Types of Data Visualization Expertise
As the data visualization landscape continues to grow in 2022, ten industries remain at the forefront of data visualization application since 2017. The top ten include: Journalism, IT, Consulting, Public Sector, Finance, Healthcare, Private Sector, Marketing, Academics and Non Profit. Patterns have emerged highlighting new ways industries are leveraging data visualizations in specific ways to merge technical and communicative methods to inform business decisions. Four areas of data visualization expertise have emerged based on industry-specific patterns: Detectives, Pioneers, Communicators, and the newest use case — Board Presenters. This latest category has sprouted as executive level practitioners are evangelizing the need for data visualizations to have a seat at the table.
The Detectives
With storytelling for the general public, journalists (6.36%) pave their own way in the data visualization field. Data visualizations originated from journalism, with Edward Tufte at the forefront.
The investigative skills of journalism data visualizers require a wider range of tools to address their pain point of accessing data efficiently (12.00%) . These roles leverage a wider range of investigative softwares to generate a wider reach of data points to tell informed stories to the general public.
The Pioneers
In IT (13.12%), the Public Sector (12.92%) and Consulting (10.45%), developing complex data visualizations is necessary to win over a wider range of decision makers. Pioneers are paving the way for uncovering complex patterns and applications of efficiently uncovering information. With roles more focused on analytics and data science, these experts have an extensive education in staying up to date with programming.
There is a higher investment in data visualization tools to address technical limitations from the standard big three tools: Excel (34.54%), Tableau (28.27%), and PowerPoint (24.67%). The technical skill set of pioneers allows access to a wider net of data and more sophisticated techniques to analyze complex information.
The Communicators
In Academia (10.40%), Marketing (5.33%) and Non Profits (10.75%), tools that will save time and build more pictorial artifacts across email, social channels and webinars are in demand. Posting and sharing information to bring people together on multiple online channel often requires more creative and interactive social media and website visualizations. Unlike Marketing and Non Profits, experts in academics (67.60%) tend to have more access to funds supporting a wider range of accessible tools.
Sharing information in these fields requires creating a narrative that can shift by applications (ie. social media, presentations, and emails). Flexibility and speed are often prioritized by communicators in order to stay relevant to the general public and grow a following. More focused in marketing, design and content creation roles, communicators are creative problem solvers. Where they lack in technical analyst skills, they often compensate in creating an impactful narrative.
The Board Meeting Presenters
Presenting to executive decision makers, these experts often have a seat at the table and data visualization is their secret weapon to getting information across. This requires connections with both pioneers and communicators to take their complex ideas and share a well-informed assessment. In addition to leveraging technical and creative applications of data visualizations, presenters often needs data to be developed internally with research support.
Healthcare (9.57%), Finance (8.23%), and Private Sector (12.87%) industries rely on dashboards and presentation artifacts to communicate their ideas to executives and managers. The level of tool sophistication is growing, but generating leads based off a particular subset of a demographic profile for a specific patient profile or technology use-case is challenging.
In healthcare, data visualizations are no longer optional. According to Demigos, the global market of healthcare data analytics is estimated to grow to $40.8 billion in 2025. Accenture’s David A.J. Axson shares in his report “Finance 2020: Death by Digital” that finance is evolving from “an expense control, spreadsheet-driven accounting and reporting center into a predictive analytics powerhouse that creates business value.” Across all sectors, the development of new data visualizations was found to be highly time consuming due to technical limitations and data access.
Considerations to Continue Growing Graphics
There is still plenty of room for growth in the data visualization field. Human brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than they do text (University of Minnesota), and sharing complex information with compelling, concise visuals is helpful regardless of the industry. When exploring data visualizations and how to adapt them, here are a few things to consider:
For Newcomers:
- When writing content or sharing information, look for ways to reduce the cognitive load of reading a wall of text.
- Make sure data is represented accurately with well sourced information when working with charts or spreadsheets.
- If new to analyzing and presenting data, Google Suite or Microsoft Office is a great place to start and is accessible across industries.
For Seasoned Experts:
- Consider taking a step outside your technical comfort level by adapting a tool favored by another use case. This is a great way to find more efficient problem-solving techniques.
- When developing data visualizations, take the visual itself and consider how to simplify it in various communication formats. Shareable formats are the key to bringing information to an executive level.
- For executive-ready visualizations, consider developing a taskforce among operational and marketing roles to analyze and share information strategically.
Design thinking is a garden. As data visualizations continue to blossom, sharing and pollinating across industries is the key to centralizing best practices. By continuing the conversation, together we will build a more design thinking culture focused on inclusion and supportive design communication.
Note:
- The Data Visualization Society (DVS) State of the Industry Survey survey is created, managed, analyzed, and published with support from the DVS Survey Committee including Amy Cesal, Alexander Furnas, Josephine K. Dru, Lisa Valade-DeMelo, Sheila B. Robinson, and Jill A. Brown.
- The data visualization society 2021 survey interviewed 2,165 visualizers, with a total of 2,028 who identified under the ten identified industry buckets (60 visualizers identified as “other”).
About the Author:
Lisa Vissichelli has specialized in data visualization for market research firms for nearly a decade. An award-winning designer, her data visualization work has been recognized by Kantar’s Information is Beautiful Awards, the Data Visualization Society and Adobe. Her talks on design thinking have been featured at UXPA Boston, International Accessibility Professionals, and American Express. Currently she is a Creative Manager at AnswerLab LLC.
