Designing effective visualisations: matching data problems to our perceptual strengths

To design and critique visualisations you need to know a little bit about how the brain works. This talk will give you the basics of perception as it applies to visualisation.

I’ll cover four main principles:

• Match perceptual and data topology
• Make important comparisons easy
• Visual connections should reflect real connections
• Beware of animation!

Each topic will be illustrated with real examples from around the web, and you’ll be able to put the principles to work right away in your own visualisations.

I’ll also show some optical illusions, cases where our visual system fails us, and show how some common visualisation techniques can be extremely misleading.