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August 01, 2006
Visualizations answering interesting questions
Matthew Hurst points to a gallery of business-style visualizations at Perceptual Edge. There are a few conclusions that can be made from Stephen Few's examples. In particular, Stephen does a good job designing graphs and tables that enable the analyst to quickly obtain answers to interesting questions:
- Rank numerical values as to speed up answering questions such as "Who's the best? Who's the worst? Who's second best? What's the difference between the first and the second?" #1,#8
- 3D charts may be flashy, but our perception is 2D. If the table has several dimensions, stratify by the order of importance. In #3, the location is deemed more important than the year.
- If there are too many comparisons to be made within a single graph, focus on pairwise comparisons and prepare a series of graphs. #6,#7
- While example #4 may seem to claim that tables are superior to graphs, Stephen's own example invalidates this claim very well.
- Do not clutter the display: instead prepare several different views of the same data #2
- Horizontal bargraphs often work better than pie charts. #5
Another important heuristic in the design of graphs is to include helpful elements that cross-index the quantities (color denoting type) #2. At the same time, one shouldn't overload the analyst's perception with irrelevant distinctions, such as using color to indicate an irrelevant quantity (#4).
Posted by Aleks at August 1, 2006 08:34 AM
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