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October 6 - December 18, 2018
if we use preattentive attributes strategically, they can help us enable our audience to see what we want them to see before they even know they’re seeing it!
our brains are hardwired to quickly pick up differences we see in our environment.
One thing to be aware of is that people tend to associate quantitative values with some (but not all) of the preattentive attributes.
preattentive attributes can be extremely useful for doing two things: (1) drawing your audience’s attention quickly to where you want them to look, and (2) creating a visual hierarchy of information.
Beyond drawing our audience’s attention to where we want them to focus it, we can employ preattentive attributes to create visual hierarchy in our communications.
there are variances within a given preattentive attribute that will draw attention with more or less strength.
Studies have shown that we have about 3–8 seconds with our audience, during which time they decide whether to continue to look at what we’ve put in front of them or direct their attention to something else.
Especially in live presentation settings, repeated iterations of the same visual, with different pieces emphasized to tell different stories or different aspects of the same story (as demonstrated in Figures 4.7, 4.8, and 4.9), can be an effective strategy.
when you highlight one point in your story, it can actually make other points harder to see.
When you’re doing exploratory analysis, you should mostly avoid the use of preattentive attributes
start by pushing everything to the background. This forces me to make explicit decisions regarding what to bring to the forefront or highlight.
Size matters. Relative size denotes relative importance.
If you’re showing multiple things that are of roughly equal importance, size them similarly. Alternatively, if there is one really important thing, leverage size to indicate that: make it BIG!
don’t let your design choices be happenstance; rather, they should be the result of explicit decisions.
I typically design my visuals in shades of grey and pick a single bold color to draw attention where I want it. My base color is grey, not black, to allow for greater contrast since color stands out more against grey than black.
For my attention-grabbing color, I often use blue for a number of reasons: (1) I like it, (2) you avoid issues of colorblindness that we’ll discuss momentarily, and (3) it prints well in black-and-white.
For color to be effective, it must be used sparingly. Too much variety prevents anything from standing out.
our perception is more limited when it comes to relative saturation, but one benefit we get is that it does carry with it some quantitative assumptions (that more heavily saturated represents greater value than less or vice versa—something you don’t get with the rainbow colors used originally as categorical differentiators).
A change in colors signals just that—a change. So leverage this when you want your audience to feel change for some reason,
In general, you should avoid using shades of red and shades of green together.
Consider also using bold, varying saturation or brightness, or adding a simple plus or minus sign in front of the numbers to ensure they stand out.
use blue to signal positive and orange for negative.
See your graphs and slides through colorblind eyes
informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures
identify one or maybe two brand-appropriate colors to use as your “audience-look-here” cues and keep the rest of your color palette relatively muted with shades of grey or black.
They see the top of the page first, which makes this precious real estate.
Form follows function.
think about what it is we want our audience to be able to do with the data (function) and then create a visualization (form) that will allow for this with ease.
We can leverage visual affordances to indicate to our audience how to use and interact with our visualizations.
highlighting effects are diluted as the percentage that are highlighted increases.
it is recommended that at most 10% of the visual design be highlighted.
Note that preattentive attributes can be layered,
“You know you’ve achieved perfection, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing to take away”
getting rid of noncritical data or components.
When detail isn’t needed, summarize.
would eliminating this change anything? No? Take it out!
Push necessary, but non-message-impacting items to the background.
We can visually pull some items to the forefront and push other elements to the background, indicating to our audience the general order in which they should process the information we are communicating.
These super-categories provide a hierarchical organization that simplifies the process of taking in the information.
The concept of accessibility says that designs should be usable by people of diverse abilities.
Applied to data visualization, I think of it as design that is usable by people of widely varying technical skills.
however, this lack of understanding is not the user’s fault; rather, it points to fault in the design.
“If it’s hard to read, it’s hard to do.”
the more complicated it looks, the more time your audience perceives it will take to understand and the less likely they are to spend time to understand it.
use a consistent, easy-to-read font
leveraging visual affordances.
choose simple language over complex, choose fewer words over more words,
a choice between simple and complicated, favor simple.
Beyond annoying our audience by trying to sound smart, we run the risk of making our audience feel dumb.
Thoughtful use of text helps ensure that your data visualization is accessible.
