Becoming a more sophisticated reader

Spurious conclusions

• Don’t jump to conclusions about the things you think you have derived from the display
• Meaning of the data: representativeness of the data, assumptions
• Causation/correlation

Pit falls/misinterpretations

• 3D displays
• Truncated y-axis – bar chart always bad, line chart and scatter to be aware of
• Aspect ratios
• Geometric calculations
• Mapping projections
• Pie charts exceeding 100%

Appreciation of context

• Challenges/constraints that might be faced by the designer
• If the font is tiny on your screen, maybe it was intended primarily for printing as a poster and would have been the right size if consumed in its native format
• Maybe a project only had access to x% of the data at the point of being published and couldn’t, for example, plot it on a map because there was no spatial data available at the time
• Maybe the project you are reading was aimed at specialists, people with domain knowledge, so your struggles are not a reflection of bad visualisation or any deficit on your side, it just wasn’t intended for you.
• You might not find it interesting, other people might. You have the right not to read/play with a visualisation!
• What would you do differently? How would you do better?