Data at a Look: Do Your Charts Suck? | by James Wilkins | Dec, 2024

How pre-attentive processing, Gestalt principle, and visible knowledge encoding inform knowledge design choices

Picture generated by DALL-E, OpenAI

Let’s face it: that report you labored on — no person’s truly going to learn it.

Within the best-case state of affairs, folks may skim via it, pausing briefly underneath the attract of a brightly-coloured diagram.

However should you’ve designed your diagrams correctly, a quick look is all somebody ought to want to grasp what the info is saying — no less than at a excessive degree.

The power to shortly convey data is what units a median graph other than a fantastic one. Let’s check out some methods from psychology that we will use to make our diagrams simpler to interpret.

Pre-attentive Options

Pre-attentive options are the design components of a chart that may be perceived with out straight being attentive to them.

They’re options that instantly seize our consideration after we first take a look at one thing.