Effectively Communicating Numbers & Tapping the power of visual perception

Note

A good introduction white paper about how to present the quantitative information for business. It is a good basic reading material [1]. The data visualization is used to enable the "visual perception" of the user, "human visual system is a pattern seeker of enormous power and subtlety". In other hand, if the data present in different way, the user may not be able to catch the invisible patterns, which makes the less effective communication.

The human eye is catching light and translate them into color and thoughts [2]. The light shines on the fovea area would be highlighting to catch more attention. The other parts of retina may with less detail, but the capable and ready to catch any point of changes, e.g. something moving or pop-up. Besides, the human brand is with long and short term memory. The short term memory is processing and discarding the received information, like a RAM in computer. The speed is quick but with very limited capacity. The long term memory requires more time to organize but can last longer for later use, like a hard drive. It would be crucial to design the visualization follow the nature of human brand preference.

There are two kind of attention of visual perception, pre-attentive and attentive. The pre-attentive is processing very quick and parallel, like pop up in your eye. For instance, a serial number with highlighted target number. The highlighted number would jump out the serial of number for the user to recognize. The preventative attribute can only be accurately to encode number in 2D locations, e.g. 2D scatter plots. More than 2D would turn the display into attentive process, which requires more time and serial process effort. One exception is to use the colored points for categorical distinguish. Hence, a 2D scatter plot with color categorical may be the best use case for user to understand the data.

Reference

1. Few, Stephen, and Perceptual Edge Principal. "Effectively Communicating Numbers." Principal Perceptual Edge. White Paper. Downloaded from (2005).
2. Few, Stephen. "Tapping the power of visual perception." Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter (2004).