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October 6 - December 18, 2018
my go-to graph type for plotting categorical data, where information is organized into groups.
bar charts should be leveraged because they are common, as this means less of a learning curve for your audience.
Note that, because of how our eyes compare the relative end points of the bars, it is important that bar charts always have a zero baseline
needed. If you want your audience to focus on big-picture trends, think about preserving the axis but deemphasizing it by making it grey. If the specific numerical values are important, it may be better to label the data points directly.
The rule we’ve illustrated here is that bar charts must have a zero baseline.
Note that this rule does not apply to line graphs.
in general the bars should be wider than the white space between the bars.
If I had to pick a single go-to graph for categorical data, it would be the horizontal bar chart,
the structure of the horizontal bar chart is such that our eyes hit the category names before the actual data.
with one exception—when I need to visualize numbers of vastly different magnitudes.
An infographic is simply a graphical representation of information or data.
specific graph types and elements that you should avoid: pie charts, donut charts, 3D, and secondary y-axes.
pie charts are hard for people to read. When segments are close in size, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to tell which is bigger. When they aren’t close in size, the best you can do is determine that one is bigger than the other, but you can’t judge by how much.
with bar charts, our eyes compare the end points.
With a donut chart, we are asking our audience to compare one arc length to another arc length
One of the golden rules of data visualization goes like this: never use 3D.
3D skews our numbers, making them difficult or impossible to interpret or compare.
If you’re wondering What is the right graph for my situation?, the answer is always the same: whatever will be easiest for your audience to read.
Have them articulate the following as they process the information: where they focus, what they see, what observations they make, what questions they have.
every single element you add to that page or screen takes up cognitive load on the part of your audience—in other words, takes them brain power to process.
In general, identify anything that isn’t adding informative value—or isn’t adding enough informative value to make up for its presence—and remove those things.
clutter. These are visual elements that take up space but don’t increase understanding.
This does not create clean lines either on the left or on the right, which can make even a thoughtful layout appear sloppy. I tend to avoid center-aligned text for this reason.
Generally, diagonal elements such as lines and text should be avoided.
the reading of rotated text 45 degrees in either direction was, on average, 52% slower than reading normally oriented text
Margins should remain free of text and visuals.
Resist the urge to stretch visuals to take up the available space; instead,
the more things we make different, the lesser the degree to which any of them stand out.
There are some elements that should always be retained with numbers, including dollar signs, percent signs, and commas in large numbers.
Chart borders are usually unnecessary,
using white space to differentiate the visual from other elements on the page
Remove gridlines
get rid of them altogether:
This isn’t to say that you should never use data markers, but rather use them on purpose and with a purpose,
trailing zeros on y-axis labels: they carry no informative value, and yet make the numbers look more complicated than they are!
abbreviate the months of the year so that they will fit horizontally on the x-axis, eliminating the diagonal text.
we can leverage the Gestalt principle of proximity and put the data labels right next to the data they describe.
leveraging the Gestalt principle of similarity and make the data labels the same color as the data they describe.
Visual clutter creates excessive cognitive load that can hinder the transmission of our message.
Leverage alignment of elements and maintain white space to help make the interpretation of your visuals a more comfortable experience for your audience.
First, preattentive attributes can be leveraged to help direct your audience’s attention to where you want them to focus it. Second, they can be used to create a visual hierarchy of elements to lead your audience through the information you want to communicate in the way you want them to process it.
Within the brain, there are three types of memory that are important to understand as we design visual communications: iconic memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
Information stays in your iconic memory for a fraction of a second before it gets forwarded on to your short-term memory.
people can keep about four chunks of visual information in their short-term memory at a given time.
one solution is to label the various data series directly
we want to form larger, coherent chunks of information so that we can fit them into the finite space in our audience’s working memory.
When something leaves short-term memory, it either goes into oblivion and is likely lost forever, or is passed into long-term memory.
Long-term memory is built up over a lifetime and is vitally important for pattern recognition and general cognitive processing.
images can help us more quickly recall things stored in our long-term verbal memory.
By combining the visual and verbal, we set ourselves up for success when it comes to triggering the formation of long-term memories in our audience.
