Building a Custom Visualization Tool to Enable Data-Driven Decision-Making at a Global Innovation Leader

In today's business landscape, organizations need to be able to make agile, evidence-based decisions in order to stay ahead of the curve. Data-driven decision-making is a vital tool for achieving this goal. By leveraging data analytics, organizations can gain valuable insights into customer behavior, market trends, and operational performance, among other things. 

Data-driven decision-making also helps organizations minimize the risk of cognitive bias in their decisions. Data can help organizations avoid costly mistakes, ensuring that important strategic choices are based on objective information rather than subjective opinions.

But all the data in the world still isn’t helpful if it’s not accessible. Organizational decision-makers are still people (for now, anyway). They still need data to be presented in a way that is useful, relevant, and easy to understand. 

This is where many organizations falter when trying to implement data-driven decision-making. Too much attention ends up focused on building out systems to collect and analyze data, and not enough on incorporating that data into existing decision-making processes. 

User-centered design (UCD) is key for addressing this stumbling block. UCD is an approach to design that centers the needs, goals, and preferences of the end user, informed by the science of human decision-making. At its core, this philosophy is all about empathetically understanding the user experience and anticipating where pain points might arise, in order to eliminate friction before it arises in the first place. TDL has tapped into UCD in many of our past projects, to build everything from a liver disease management app to a workplace therapy chatbot. 

 In 2021, TDL was approached by one of the world’s leading motor vehicle manufacturers for help conducting a rigorous evaluation of their new sales model. We used cutting-edge data science methodologies to measure its ROI, then developed a set of concrete recommendations to address structural and behavioral barriers. 

The client decided they wanted to take things a step further. They wanted a tool that would help them visualize key performance indicators over time and aid their strategic decision-making processes going forward. 

TDL developed a custom-built data visualization dashboard for the client’s sales team, visualizing key business data in an user-friendly interactive tool. We harnessed the principles of UCD and decision science to create an interface that is intuitive and conducive to agile, intentional decision-making. 

We used Power BI to build out a dashboard molded to our client’s unique needs. Not only did it need to be easy to use, it also needed to visualize the very specific data points that they had realized were most relevant to their business and sales goals, and how those variables correlated with one another. 

Our client has scaled the tool we built for them to all areas of their operations, and have integrated it into their current strategy as a key decision-making tool. The custom dashboard is being used to visualize millions of dollars in sales, identify drivers of performance, and track performance over time. Even in unpredictable and turbulent times, data can help the sales team stay nimble, ready to respond to changes and emerging trends before the competition knows they’re happening.