Design Principles for Visual Communication

Design Principles for Visual Communication [1]

Synopsis

This paper discusses techniques for automatically creating domain-specific visualizations.

Strengths

  1. The paper provides a systematic, thorough approach to creating the intended visualizations.
  2. 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.)
  3. 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.
  4. Example of a useful (if obvious) principle: "Visual techniques can be used to either emphasize important information or de-emphasize irrelevant details."
  5. Interesting example of their work: http://vis.berkeley.edu/DestMap.

Weaknesses

  1. 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."
  2. 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.