Visual Variables
I've been designing some new visualizations recently, and reading around the InfoVis literature for examples to analyse and best practices to follow. I've found myself returning again and again to a diagram in MacKinlay's 1986 paper and various papers which follow it. So much so that I've reworked a version of the diagram and pinned it to the wall behind my desk for quick reference:
It shows a theoretical model for accuracy when performing reasoning tasks with an image. The model was developed empirically but for some comparisons and some analytical tasks experimentation has backed it up. I find it a handy thing to have when working out how visualizations and infographics are put together. And when I have some data that I'm designing an representation for, it helps me choose what visual variables to use.
Labels: design, visualization
1 Comments:
Hi,
Thank you very much for having resumed everything in such a compact table. Even if I've seen these results many times elsewhere I realize that having it ready next to me on my desk is totally different.
I would like to point you to two sources that might be of interest to you and that suddenly came into my mind as soon as I saw your table.
The first is a table very similar to yours that you can find in this paper:
"Polaris: A System for Query, Analysis, and Visualization of Multidimensional Relational Databases" by Stolte at al.
Actually in their table the dimension "shape" is also taken into account.
The second is the deep analysis of graphical features' performance made by Cleveland in his "The Elements of Graphing Data".
By the way, thank you for the table! I'm going to print it and put it on the wall.
(FYI: I added your blog in the blogroll of my Visuale Blog)
Good Luck!
Enrico.
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