This presentation is designed as an introduction to information visualization and aims to provide details about: - Key ideas and techniques related to the creation and critique of visualizations - What levers visualizations help us pull as designers - Why visualizations are useful and how they relate to user goals - Various motivations, trade-offs, and responsibilities surrounding visualizations

1. Elizabeth Murnane
Information Visualization

2. — What is information visualization?
— What are visualizations good for?
— Design guidelines & techniques
— HCI Visualization User Goals
— Responsibilities, considerations, alternate solutions
Today’s Plan

3. — What is information visualization?
— What are visualizations good for?
— Design guidelines & techniques
— HCI Visualization User Goals
— Responsibilities, considerations, alternate solutions
Today’s Plan

4. — What is information visualization?
— What are visualizations good for?
— Design guidelines & techniques
— HCI Visualization User Goals
— Responsibilities, considerations, alternate solutions
Today’s Plan

5. — What is information visualization?
— What are visualizations good for?
— Design guidelines & techniques
— HCI Visualization User Goals
— Responsibilities, considerations, alternate solutions
Today’s Plan

6. — What is information visualization?
— What are visualizations good for?
— Design guidelines & techniques
— HCI Visualization User Goals
— Responsibilities, considerations, alternate solutions
Today’s Plan

7. — What is information visualization?
— What are visualizations good for?
— Design guidelines & techniques
— HCI Visualization User Goals
— Responsibilities, considerations, alternate solutions
— Have fun!
◦ Playing with, brainstorming about, and evaluating
visualizations
Today’s Plan

8. — Visualization: “The use of computer-­‐‑supported,
interactive, visual representations of data to amplify
cognition” (Card et al., 1998)
— Graphical depiction of understandable information
◦ Transformation of data to information
— Mental models
— Creates an “artificial memory that best supports our
natural means of perception” (Bertin)
Key Concepts

9. — Reason about, communicate, document, and
preserve knowledge (Tufte)
— Quickly understand and assimilate information
— Gain and share insights
◦ Discovery and decision-­‐‑making
◦ Explanation and dissemination
— Purpose is not the visualizations themselves
Why do we use visualizations?

10. — Analyzing information
◦ Discover paZerns and explore trends
◦ Determine underlying factors and notice relationships
◦ Reason, plan, problem-­‐‑solve
— Communicating information
◦ Present, explain, illustrate
◦ Point out key aspects & minimize less relevant details
◦ Education
Viz Types: Viewing vs. Creating

11. An interactive meta-viz of Viz
Ralph Lengler & Martin J. Eppler, Towards A Periodic
Table of Visualization Methods for Management, 2007.
Interactive version at: www.visual-­‐‑literacy.org

12. — Handle the expanding volume and diversity of data
— Summarize, organize, and incorporate multiple
layers of information into single illustration
— An aesthetic and appealing format makes
comprehension process more enjoyable
Power of Visualization

13. Some classic examples

14. Napoleon’s March – Minard,1861

15. — Illustrates multiple facets of the data (i.e.,
geography, time, temperature, army size, direction
of movement)
— Also serves as a record of the data
Napoleon’s March – Minard,1861

16. Cholera Epidemic

17. — Norman: “The power of the unaided mind is highly
overrated”
— Visualizations aid thinking
◦ Increase human perceptual processing and aZention
◦ Expand our working memory
◦ Reduce the search for information
◦ Enhance our ability to recognize paZerns
◦ Help us notice irregularities and anomalies
Amplifying Human Cognition

18. — Multiply 66 x 43 in your head
Multiplication

19. — Multiply 66 x 43 in your head
— Multiply 66 x 43 on paper
Multiplication

20. — Multiply 66 x 43 in your head
— Multiply 66 x 43 on paper
— People perform 5 times faster with the visual aid
Multiplication

21. — Norman: “The power of the unaided mind is highly
overrated”
— Visualizations aid thinking
◦ Increase human perceptual processing and aZention
◦ Expand our working memory
◦ Reduce the search for information
◦ Enhance our ability to recognize paZerns
◦ Help us notice irregularities and anomalies
Amplifying Human Cognition

22. What’s interesting here?

23. What’s interesting here?

24. Revealing Correlation

25. Revealing Outliers

26. v HCI+Viz: Orient visualizations around users and tasks,
not visualizations themselves
v Schneiderman / Carr
— Overview
— Zoom
— Filter
— Details-­‐‑on-­‐‑demand
— Relate
— History
— Extract
Fulfilling User Tasks

27. v Metaphors
v Tufte’s Rules
v Gestalt theories of form and configuration
v CRAP: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity
— Utilize multi-­‐‑functioning graphical elements
◦ intuitive cues that convey information
◦ meaning through shape, size, location, color, orientation, motion
— Use small multiples
◦ repetition, similarity, invite comparison
— Show process and causality
— Separate and layer
◦ stratify, order, relate
— Use color effectively
◦ highlight, distinguish, show selection
— Avoid extraneous “junk” components that add cluZer and confusion
◦ information overload, disruptive with no purpose, “above all, do no harm”
Some Principles for Viz Design

29. Infographic Advertising from Honda

30. — Informative / Aesthetic
— Dynamic / Static
— Interactivity
— Appropriateness given data, domain, application
— Alternative sensory inputs
— Social visualization & transparency, ambiguity,
behavior
Considerations and Choices

32. Baby Name Voyager

33. Facebook Friend Wheel

34. — Schneiderman: "ʺStatistics alone are dangerous and they
hide a lot”
◦ Viz can help reveal problems otherwise hard to detect
— Heer: Important we also uncover, assess, and verify a
visualization’s credibility
◦ Provide interactivity and feedback
— Tufte: “Graphical integrity”
— Lie Factor & exaggeration
— Careful of size, area, volume, perspective, baseline, context
— Distortion ever useful?
Truth in Visualization

35. Misleading Graphics
Stock Market Crash?!

36. Show full scale

37. Show context

38. — Values and goals
— Good, bad, interesting, effective, informative, overly
complicated, visually appealing?
— Appropriate graphical representation for the data?
— Who are the users?
— Accessibility
— Methods of evaluation
— Testing designs with people
Evaluating Visualizations

39. Treemap

41. US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud

43. isbarackobamathepresident.com

44. Oakland Crimespotting
hZp://oakland.crimespoZing.org/

45. — hZp://visual.ly/
◦ Info graphics & data viz centered community
◦ Search and explore visualizations for information and inspiration, set up a portfolio
of your own work to share, and follow and connect with other designers
◦ Offers blog with posts about trends, tools, tips, opportunities, and stories
— hZp://www.visualizing.org/
◦ View a gallery of visualizations or upload and showcase your own
◦ Enter challenges to create visualizations from a given dataset. New challenges open
up all the time: hZp://www.visualizing.org/contests/visualize-­‐‑us-­‐‑election
— hZp://www.google.com/publicdata/directory
◦ Google'ʹs visualization engine that offers an online tool to interactively explore and
visualize data.
◦ Use public datasets from around the world or upload your own data
— hZp://www.informationisbeautiful.net/
— hZp://www.coolinfographics.com/
— hZp://infosthetics.com/
Additional Resources