Snacks

Visualization Snacks are brief bits of visualization knowledge in written form. The idea is to put things into a form where you can get the main message quickly, and then refer to the details if you want.

Airline Route Maps: An interesting Solution to a Node-Link Problem

Let’s look at the “Airline Route Maps” (the ones that are in the back of an airline magazine) as a way to explore the importance of task and how understanding task and data can lead to novel designs. It will show us a different way to think about node link diagrams more generally.

Core lesson: think about what a visualization makes easy to see. Different representations make some things easier, and harder. And be careful when with dealing with geographic data in the US: populations and counties are spread unevenly.

This is a lesson on Axis Truncation for Line Graphs. It was inspired by a graph in the New York Times.

Don’t make the wrong thing easy to see. Here’s a real example from my own work where a seemingly innocent line graph was misleading, and needed some serious redesign.

Line charts can be used (with caution) even when the X axis is neither interval or continuous.

In this snack, we look at “value over time” graphs in two different iPhone apps. It’s a good opportunity to connect design and task with a comparative critique.

Snacks

Airline Route Maps: An interesting Solution to a Node-Link Problem

Unemployment Changes Across The Country

College Attendance Line Chart

A Robot Performance Graph Mistake

Cairo Discrete Line

Phone App Time Graphs