philthy

Designing Information
Ahn Dang
Nirali Patel

information visualization
1 visual representation of data
interactive
amplifies cognition

visualization highlights patterns and relationships in the data

patterns and relationships pull together a common knowledge to help you understand what the information is we’re looking at

assign data types, for example from conference attendees:
quantitative: #of attendees
nominal: gender, city, state, country
ordinal: city, state, country (can be multiple data types)

map data types to visual features
position saturation
length hue …

mackinlay’s visual features (look up chart)

by assigning hue saturation to a data type, you can visually display data saturation

adding interactivity - information seeking mantra
- overview first: high level overview/representation
- zoom and filter - allows you to zoom into a particular aspect
details on demand - get more info that might not have been pertinent at the high level

map on visual variable of length (cool way to talk about it)

www.gapminder.org

get your data and understand your data types, map it to these visual variables

the appropriate display type is a whole other discussion, this is about understanding your data

infosthetics (blog)
many eyes - IBM data visualization tool

email anh.dang@avenuea-razorfish.com for a copy of the presentation (and that mackinley diagram)
animation is another visual feature (motion) — gapminder uses motion and that is a good example