From academic courses to online articles, discussions of visualization often abound with design guidelines: Don’t use pie charts! Don’t use rainbow color maps! Ensure axes include zero! When applied in a proper context, such guidelines help prevent misleading visualizations. However, such guidelines are not always well-known, and are themselves subject…

In daily life, we often find ourselves trying to separate signal from noise. For example, does the monthly jobs report suggest a growth trend, or that the jobs rate is steady? In a pair of experiments, we found that hypothetical outcome plots (HOPs) — animated samples of possible outcomes —…

The real world is full of uncertainty, but it can be tough to communicate that uncertainty. This is especially true for data visualization…

The more visual comparisons an analyst makes, the more likely they are to find spurious patterns — a version of the Multiple Comparisons Problem (MCP) well known in statistical hypothesis testing. We discuss recent research from Zgraggen, Zhao, Zeleznik & Kraska (CHI 2018) that investigates this problem through a careful…

We are excited to announce the official version 2 release of Vega-Lite, a high-level language for rapidly creating interactive visualizations. Vega-Lite enables concise descriptions of visualizations as a set of encodings that map data fields to the properties of graphical marks. Vega-Lite uses a portable JSON format that compiles…

What if Visualizations Asked Users to Predict the Data First? Imagine a data journalist writing a story about home prices in Denver. The journalist is planning to add a visualization to help users understand the trend of home price in 2014, 2015 and 2016. The visualization could just show you the data, like we encounter all the time. But what…

A single chart is often not enough to understand data and to convey a story. So it’s not surprising that people use multiple charts in sequence to convey their findings and craft narratives. For example, the following New York Times interactive article describes a global climate change agreement through a…

William Playfair was an early pioneer of information visualization. Here is one of his charts, a 1786 depiction of the national debt of England: The version I’ve posted here is too small to make out many of the finer details. Yet, I’d argue that this chart still communicates a clear…

In 1977, Jerry Ehman — an astronomer working with the SETI project to seek out alien life — came across an interesting radio signal, one needle in the haystack of all of the electromagnetic signals that SETI monitors. An incredibly strong radio signal, one that matches many of the…