Introduction to Visualization

Patrik Lundblad
Visualization Advocate

Patrik Lundblad
Experience
Visualization Advocate and Product Manager
NComVA founder, acquired by Qlik in May13
PhD in Visualization and Interaction
Follow me on Twitter: @visualpatrik

Why?

Why Visualization

Why Visualization

Data

Visualization

Why Visualization

Data

Visualization

Information

Your brain is a pattern-detecting machine

The Visual Mind

Visual Perception

Low-level property
extraction

Edges
Color
Texture
Movements

Pattern perception
Contours
Motion

Goal directed
processing
Few objects dealt at
once
Focus on a small
number of visual
features

Information Visualization: Perception for Design, Colin Ware

10

Pre-Attentive Processing

Pre-Attentive Processing

Find 3 in this series:

49864118710985767838209492850129742756

75649098357620978840129189864128571742

12

Pre-Attentive Processing

13

Graphical features processed pre-attentively

14

Visual Perception

Patterns

16

Background vs. Foreground

17

Size

LARGER ELEMENTS TEND TO BE

PERCIEVED AS MORE IMPORTANT
18

Short Term Memory

"The magical number 72"

20

Chunking

HLUNESAUROYINIIOUTNT

UNLEASH YOUR INTUITION

21

Chunking

1 Chunk

22

Practical

24

Before

25

After

26

Color

Color

28

Understanding how we perceive colors

29

Cones vs Rods

125M

7M

Cones

Rods

30

http://visual.ly/common-birthdays

31

Cones

Attribution: Mark Fairchild

2%

33%

65%
Fovea
Cones

32

Colour Blindness

About 8% of males, but only 0.5% of females, are colour blind in

some way or another.

16

8
(but red green colour blind
will see 3!)

33

Make Things Obvious

28

116

34

Can you order these (low->hi)

35

Meaningful Data

36

What colors to use?

Company branding

Viz branding

37

Possible Colour of Sequences

www.colorbrewer2.org

38

Best Visualization

40

41

London Tube Map - 2014

42

Mapping Data to Visualizations

Discrete
Nominal
Ordinal

Position

Comparison

Length

Relationship

Continuous
Interval
Ratio

Area

Composition

Shape

Distribution

Sum to Total

Color

Scale, Units

Has NULLs

Data
Attributes

Visual
Encoding

Usage
43

Data Attributes
Ratio
Cost: $15, $30, $45
Age: 10 years, 20 years, 30 years
Interval

Temperature: -5 , 10 , 25

Time: 1am, 5am, 9am

Ordinal
Size: Small, Medium, Large
Position: 1st, 2nd, 3rd
Nominal
Sex: Male, Female
Sports: Soccer, American Fotball
44

Data Attributes

http://community.qlik.com/blogs/qlikviewdesignblog/2014/09/01/scales-of-measurement
45

Visual Encoding

46

Ranking of Quantitative Perceptual Tasks

Position

More
Accurate

Length

Angle

Area

Volume

Color

Less
Accurate

47

NOMINAL

ORDINAL

INTERVAL / RATIO

More
Accurate

Less
Accurate
48

Data encoding errors

49

From Education Services

50

This isnt news

The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for
Information Visualizations. Ben Shneiderman
How NOT to Lie with Visualization. Bernice E. Rogowitz, Lloyd A.
Treinish
Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and
Application to the Development of Graphical Methods. William
S. Cleveland; Robert McGill

Thank You