035

Data Visualization

The visual presentation of data to aid the discovery of important relationships among content and to inform meaningful narratives that move people through information

  • Wurman’s “hat racks,” or LATCH—organizes information by location, alphabet, time, category, or hierarchy.
  • It is often beneficial to specify a coordinate system that will serve as an anchor for the visualization. Yau outlines coordinate system options as (1) Cartesian (x and y axes), (2) polar (radius and angles), and (3) geographic (latitude and longitude location).
  • Scales are used to represent the data accurately and consistently, including linear, categorical, percent, logarithmic, ordinal, and time.
  • The emerging organizational structures, coordinate systems, and scales of the data can inform its visual representation.
  • Norman’s Appropriateness Principle explains the import of having a good fit between form and content.

Contributed by Stacie Rohrbach

See alsoCognitive Mapping • Data Physicalization • Thematic Networks

A designer at Carnegie Mellon University leverages Yau’s visual cues and Norman’s Appropriateness Principle in the representation of bike crash data.

image

Courtesy of Jay Huh

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