There's a technical component of visualization that leans towards code, data formatting, and clicking the right buttons in the right order. Then there's everything else that makes okay charts into something much better. Read More
Category Archives: process
Posted by in design, process, questions, The Process
How data changes the design process at every stage
On Multiple Views, the Interactions Lab talks about their experience as a design studio and how quickly implementations can change when you introduce real data into the system:
It’s easy to assume that the tools and approaches used for general software design apply equally to data visualization design. But data visualization design and interface design are often deeply and fundamentally distinct from one another. We learned this the hard way when we turned our research lab into a collaborative data visualization design studio for a few years. Data permeates visualization interfaces in ways that pose challenges at every stage of the design process. These challenges are even greater within large visualization teams. By reflecting on and articulating these challenges, we hope to inspire new, powerful data visualization design tools and communication processes.
Always start with real data. You’re wasting your time otherwise.
5 Tips for Learning to Code for Visualization
Here are some tips to get you started, based on my own experiences with R, and more recently, the JavaScript library d3.js. Read More
Treating visualization as a process
Many people think of visualization as a plug-in tool that spits out something to look at. Microsoft Excel comes to mind. Some think of visualization as just that final chart to put on a presentation slide. However, there’s always a backstory about how it was made, who made it, why it was made, and most importantly, how the data came about. This is often more important than the finished product.
Artist Jer Thorp wrote about this a while back — about how visualization is a process. More recently, Jake Porway, the director of DataKind, wrote more about the process and how it ties into more rigorous analyses.
When data visualization is used simply to show alluring infographics about whether people like Coke or Pepsi better, the stakes of persuasion like this are low. But when they are used as arguments for or against public policy, the misuse of data visualization to persuade can have drastic consequences. Data visualization without rigorous analysis is at best just rhetoric and, at worse, incredibly harmful.
You need that analysis to figure out what you actually see in a visualization.
For those who make data graphics, this means picking and prodding at the data before you throw up a graph. For example, mean and median can mean a lot of things for a distribution. For those on the consumption side, this means questioning each graphic you see and don’t take every at face value. The bars and lines are usually much more squishy than they appear on the screen.
Tags: process
Posted by in process, statistics