contributed articles

Doi: 10.1145/1924421.1924439

How to identify, instantiate, and evaluate
domain-specific design principles for creating
more effective visualizations.

By maneesh aGRaWaLa, WiLmot Li,
anD FLoRaine BeRthouzoz
Design
Principles
for Visual
Communication

VISuAL communIcATIon VIA diagrams, sketches, charts, photographs, video, and animation is fundamental to the process of exploring concepts and disseminating information. The most-effective visualizations capitalize on the human facility for processing visual information, thereby improving comprehension, memory, and inference. Such visualizations help analysts quickly find patterns lurking within large data sets and help audiences quickly understand complex ideas.

Over the past two decades a number of books10, 15, 18, 23
have collected examples of effective visual displays.
One thing is evident from inspecting them: the best
are carefully crafted by skilled human designers.
Yet even with the aid of computers, hand-designing
effective visualizations is time-consuming and

requires considerable effort. Moreover, the rate at which people world-wide generate new data is growing exponentially year to year. Gantz et al. 5 estimated we collectively produced 161 exabytes of new information in 2006, and the compound growth rate between 2007 and 2011 would be 60% annually. We are thus expected to produce 1,800 exabytes of information in 2011, 10 times more than the amount we produced in 2006. Yet acquiring and storing this data is, by itself, of little value. We must understand it to produce real value and use it to make decisions.

The problem is that human designers lack the time to hand-design effective visualizations for this wealth of data. Too often, data is either poorly visualized or not visualized at all. Either way, the results can be catastrophic; for example, Tufte24 explained how Morton Thiokol engineers failed to visually communicate the risks of launching the Challenger Space Shuttle to NASA management in 1986, leading to the vehicle’s disasterous failure. While Robison et al. 20 argued the engineers must not be blamed for the Challenger accident, better communication of the risks might have prevented the disaster.

Skilled visual designers manipulate the perception, cognition, and

key insights

Design principles connect the visual design of a visualization with the viewer’s perception and cognition of the underlying information the visualization is meant to convey.

identifying and formulating good design principles often requires analyzing the best hand-designed visualizations, examining prior research on the perception and cognition of visualizations, and, when necessary, conducting user studies into how visual techniques affect perception and cognition.

Given a set of design rules and quantitative evaluation criteria, we can use procedural techniques and/or energy optimization to build automated visualization-design systems.

IllustratIon by Mark skIllIcorn