Click through for more.

(via Ann Althouse)

2. Blogger Ann Althouse reduces the reductive aesthetic:

Oddly, I came away feeling that the 10 principles were all the same, and if that principle was simple functionality, the make that one thing into 10 is a violation of the principle itself. But then Rams wasn’t purporting to dictate the principles of website content, so there really is no paradox.

3. Could you have one principle with ten examples and still get the page-views? Lists are so addictive.

Click through for full-size map, more data, and editorial content (whose thesis I find entirely unconvincing).

I’m more intrigued by the effectiveness of the visualization as an informational device. The juxtaposition is what matters, not the “true size”. If you mapped the true size of Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Central America against the continent of North America the result would be entirely pointless.

What makes Krause’s map intriguing is the contrast between large countries and a continent comprised mostly of small ones. To make a North American map of equivalent interest I would replace the large land masses of Canada, the United States, and Mexico with numerous small countries (to reverse the conceit we could replace Central America with Madagascar — a number of small countries with one large). Thus, we learn about the size of the selected countries as well as the size of the continent.

…a new interactive graph on The New York Times website invites readers to plot their reactions to two questions: How much of a turning point in the war on terror will Bin Laden’s death represent? (significant to insignificant), and What is your emotional response? (positive to negative).

The format is useful for commenters because they can easily click a square and answer two questions at once, and it’s useful for the casual reader, who can measure the feelings of the crowd at a glance. When you first visit the page, you can click on any square to see others’ comments or to plot your own—or, you can just watch for a few minutes, as I did, as random comments slowly float up and fade out from the mosaic.

To me the format is far more interesting than the opinions. The format shapes the aggregate results.

Given quadrants, there is bias toward adhering to a quadrant.

Given edges there is bias toward approaching the edges.

Given existing dots, I strongly suspect there is bias toward clumping.

Now that I’ve looked at this interactive a few times the other thing that interests me is how it would look as an animation. The Columbia Journalism Review article offers a screen shot taken much earlier than the one above. The patterns are already taking shape.

Given multiple documents, readers will make more judgments based on typography as they find it harder to make judgments based on substance.

On one level this is pretty reductive. A situation where all other considerations are equal except typography (or design, for that matter) never exists. But just because a reader starts reading an article or brief doesn’t mean the reader will finish it. Butterick writes:

I believe that most readers are looking for reasons to stop reading. Not because they’re malicious or aloof. They’re just being rational. If readers have other demands on their time, why should they pay any more attention than they absolutely must? Readers are always looking for the exit.

It’s an information design problem: How do you move a reader along in the flow?

Next question: Is legal size really necessary?

Today the New York Times offers a perfect example. In the debate around U.S. health care overhaul, the president’s budget director Peter Orszag argued that savings could be found by reforming the current system:

Mr Orszag displayed maps produced by Dartmouth researchers that appeared to show where the waste in the system could be found. Beige meant hospitals and regions that offered good, efficient care; chocolate meant bad and inefficient.

The maps made reform seem relatively easy to many in Congress, some of whom demanded the administration simply trim the money Medicare pays to hospitals and doctors in the brown zones. The administration promised to seriously consider doing just that. [my emphasis]

Unfortunately, the maps don’t show what they seem to show. While they show cost of care (a very specific kind of care it should be noted), they don’t show quality of care. Nor do the maps show anything about the demographics of the patients being cared for.

The Times compares the Dartmouth map (on the left) to Medicare’s own analysis of hospital quality (on the right) to show the disconnect. However, the Medicare map raises questions of its own. To start with, it shows a suspicious correspondence to U.S. population density.

Perhaps quality of care relates to the proposition that higher population density creates demand for more specialists which leads to better diagnoses. I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of this. Before anyone draws another map, let’s work on better analysis.

The way human brains process the sight of movement appears to be one reason for this outcome. The visceral reading of trajectory events — such as an animation of moving cars — creates an anticipatory judgment that is highly persuasive to higher brain functions.

Also important is the fact that every visualization incorporates a point of view, one that is all the more convincing for its visual immediacy:

The information can be conveyed with certain emphases, shown from certain angles, slowed down, or enlarged. (In a sense, all this is true of text as well, but with subtler effects.) Animations can whitewash the guesswork and assumptions that go into interpreting reconstructions. By creating a picture of one possibility, they make others seem less likely, even if they’re not. (my emphasis)

In essence, this is what we do on purpose. Whether for marketing, analysis, or scientific reportage, we quite explicitly present the story of the strongest possibility (which may well be that there are multiple possibilities). We do it ethically; we rely upon validated data to tell a story and honor the integrity of that data as we work. The Harvard study cautions us not to let our visual tools — especially our analytical tools — persuade us too easily of what the real story is.

Reporter Drake Bennett leads with the fact that “shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names.” He continues:

Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author (my emphasis).

However, the flip side of easy equals true — or “an instinctive preference for the familiar” as Bennett defines the concept — is that to generate reflection or curiosity, you may need to make things less familiar. It’s a good thing we know how to do both.

TED Blog just posted a followup interview with neuroscientist/artist Beau Lotto, whose specialty is studying the relationship between your brain and what you see.  According to Lotto, “The light that falls onto your eyes is meaningless.”    In other words, light falling on a surface by itself does not convey meaning.  Rather, what we see is a product of  history, environment, and observation.  Lotto’s 2009 TED Talk, “Optical Illusions Show How We See” demonstrates that optical illusions are not visual tricks so much as a means for making sense of the world based on our accumulated knowledge:

Illusion is more a state of the world than it is a state of mind. What’s being presented to you is an unusual situation. What you see is what would have been useful, given that situation in the past…The far more interesting question is not that “context matters” — not that we see illusions — but why we see them. When you see illusions, you’re entertaining two realities at the same time. You’re seeing one reality (two gray squares look different) but you also know another reality (that the gray squares are, in fact, physically the same).

Lotto’s comments provide good food for thought from an information design perspective, since information (visual or otherwise) has no inherent meaning until we view it through a lens that takes into account what the intended audience cares most about– their needs and goals–a by-product of their experience, expectations, and environment.

To find out more, see Beau Lotto’s web site: http://www.lottolab.org/index.asp.

The gauge is the invention of engineer and physicist Chris Holloway. The Wall Street Journal Numbers Guy, Carl Bialik, explains:

Holloway has noticed that the typical pour in a pint glass is less than a pint. And since the widest part of the glass is at the top — nearly twice as wide as the bottom — leaving just the top half-inch of the glass unfilled costs the customer nearly 15% of the pint he’s paying for. So what may look trivial to bartenders and to drinkers, thanks to our tendency to focus on height rather than width when taking the measure of liquids, is a serious tavern injustice.

Readers of Edward R. Tufte will remember that one grave mistake in visualizing data is to show one-dimensional data with two-dimensional graphics:

There are considerable ambiguities in how people perceive a two-dimensional surface and then convert that perception into a one-dimensional number. Changes in physical area on the surface of a graphic do not reliably produce appropriately proportional changes in in perceived areas. The problem is all the worse when the areas are tricked up into three dimensions. (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2001, p. 71.)

Holloway had the reverse challenge — the problem people have perceiving differences in volume. The gauge turns three-dimensional data into a one-dimensional series. It is a portable liquid measure.

I will add that despite the elegance of the Holloway’s concept, the gauge as is could use some design improvement. Holloway has elected to emphasis even numbers of ounces. I’m not sure this helps readability. There’s also no reason to have the 6 oz. label offset from the 6 oz. line. Just make the card a quarter inch longer or so. Nor is there reason for the key or the “Glass edge” and “Beer surface” labels. Instead, replace all of this extra text with a 16 oz. line aligned to the top of the glass that incorporates some minimal description. For example:

16 oz beer / 0% missing
15 oz / 7%
14 oz / 13%

etc.