Design Principles for Visual Communication
Design Principles for Visual Communication [1]
Synopsis
This paper discusses techniques for automatically creating domain-specific visualizations.
Strengths
- The paper provides a systematic, thorough approach to creating the intended visualizations.
- Automatic visualizations are especially useful in situations where "human designers lack the time to hand-design effective visualizations", for example, in designing a street map giving directions to a selected location. (Their system does, reportedly, much better than Google maps, for example.)
- A key ingredient in their approach is to analyze the best hand-designed examples for a domain they can find, then generalize principles from these designs. They use perception and cognition research, as well as user studies, to inform their choices.
- Example of a useful (if obvious) principle: "Visual techniques can be used to either emphasize important information or de-emphasize irrelevant details."
- Interesting example of their work: http://vis.berkeley.edu/DestMap.
Weaknesses
- Some statements are difficult to understand and so take time to comprehend: "Such 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."
- Their strategies "all require significant human effort to identify commonalities in hand-designed visualizations, synthesize the relevant prior studies in perception and cognition, and conduct such studies."
Bibliography
1. Maneesh Agrawala, Wilmot Li, and Floraine Berthouzoz, Design Principles for Visual Communication.
page revision: 1, last edited: 25 Apr 2011 21:40