Business Information Visuals and User Learning : A Case of Companies Listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand

The majority of graphs and visuals made publicly available by Thai listed companies tend to be disjointed and minimal. Only a little over fifty percent of the total 478 companies included graphic representations of their business operations and performance in the form of two or three dimensional spreadsheet based graphs in their annual reports, investor relations documents, websites and so on. For novice users, these visual representations are unlikely to give the big picture of what is the company's financial position and performance. Neither will they tell where the company stands in its own operating environment. The existing graphics and visuals, in very rare cases, can provide a sense of the company's future outlook. For boundary users such as audit committees whose duty is to promote good governance through transparency and disclosure, preliminary interview results show that there is some doubt as to whether the inclusion of big-picture visuals can really be of use to minority shareholders. These boundary users expect to see more insightful visuals beyond those produced by traditional spreadsheets which will enable them to learn to cope with the on-going turbulence in today's business environment more quickly. However, the debate is still going on as to where to draw the line between internal or external reporting visuals.