The first iteration of Euromonitor International’s Industry Overview Dashboard proved incredibly successful with clients and as an internal sales tool. However, after a few years I realised the design could use some updates to better align to the needed some updates to better align with the brand, but more importantly look at the data in some different ways.
The biggest change dealt with the map. Perhaps paradoxically, I wanted to make it both larger and less important. To the latter, it turns out people are often not the best at identifying countries on a map. And so with the goal of clearly communicating which markets are larger, growing faster, &c., maps provide less clear results that require more interactions with the display to find names and labels. Consequently, maps also do not spectacularly succeed as a navigational element. If a user does not know where Nigeria is on a map, how can they navigate to a dataset focusing on Nigeria? So I placed our panel of categories into a drawer that users pulled out from a control on the left-hand side of the piece. But this also allowed me to add a separate control for changing geographies, making it easier for people to find countries of interest.
I also I redesigned the layout of the piece to include a larger map. As it turns out, while people lack complete familiarity with maps, they really like seeing them. Additionally, a lot of customers remain interested in Western Europe and Eastern Europe. But these are often among the smallest countries, geographically speaking. And a larger map makes it easier to differentiate the Czech Republic from Slovakia from Hungary.
But more importantly, I included two new visualisation formats for the data, the first being a bar chart that displays the same data as on the map. The second required a small change on our database side, but since most of Euromonitor International’s syndicated content offers both size and growth, I combined the two datasets on one scatterplot. To counter the oft-seen effect of China, the United States, and India dwarfing market sizes in actual value, I placed sizes on a longer x-axis and made sure that per capita data, when available, was an option alongside growth.
In order to make space for the larger visualisations, however, I moved what people called the “deep-dive” visualisations below the map into smaller cards. These self-contained pieces layer atop the main visualisation and can be minimised, saved, and exported as visuals. This additional space in the cards allowed us in particular to show more of the channel distribution graphic, which to this day remains a very popular graphic.
The default view showcases market data in both size and growth and makes better use of navigation and display size than in v1
The increased space for visualisations allowed us to provide larger maps for more detail, especially useful in Europe
We also used the space to allow users to see new and better ways of visualising market size data
The Explore in Detail card provides deeper insights on the selected market, including where it ranks in relation to other markets, its year-on-year performance against its region and global data, and the top-three companies in the market
For the Channel View, the Explore in Detail card shows the hierarchy of distribution channels, their size, and their growth trend