When you have important information to communicate, graphics can be invaluable. A good graphic can make even complex data easier to understand.
That’s because the human brain is exceptionally good at processing visual information. A team of neuroscientists from MIT recently established that the brain needs only 13 milliseconds to process an entire image. Compared to words, which are digested in a linear way using short-term memory, pictures are gulped down all at once and go directly into long-term memory.
So images win! But wait: the ice is slippery… Remember that your graphics should serve the information being presented. If the graphics instead distract or confuse your audience, you may have one of the following problems.
1. Everything Looks Like a Nail
Not every concept needs a graphic. Would a visual element enhance your audience’s understanding of the concept? If not, a graphic would just be a decoration — or worse, a distraction. Those “spurious correlation” graphs — plotting, for example, the “correlation” between the divorce rate in Maine and per capital consumption of margarine from 2000 to 2009 — are entertaining precisely because the visual representation does not serve the data, instead creating a fictional meaning (a suggested causality).
2. Clutter: It’s All Just Too Much
Too many visuals can lead to clutter, and that’s no good at all for communication. Piling on the graphics quickly reduces their usefulness. For one thing, human eyes can’t see two different things in the same location. It’s called binocular rivalry. Two different images seen close together will compete for visual dominance in the brain, so that the viewer experiences the images as alternating rather than synthesized.
3. Font Effects
Fonts are fun! And they’re a vital element of visual communication. But they’re not to be chosen lightly. Studies have demonstrated that fonts can affect readers’ mood and cognitive performance. Fonts can even influence your audience’s perceptions about the information being communicated.
In an experiment conducted by Errol Morris of the New York Times, readers’ perception of the truth of a factual statement changed with the font used. The readers were more likely to perceive a statement as true when it was presented in Baskerville than when the same statement appeared in Comic Sans.
4. How Big Is That in Elephants?
To help an audience absorb unfamiliar data, you might employ more familiar units of measurement — elephants, blue whales, Empire State Buildings, football fields, Olympic-size swimming pools, and so forth. As long as the units are truly familiar (not every audience has seen the Albert Hall), accurate (are the elephants African or Asian?), and helpful, this approach can produce graphics that serve your data effectively.
But use it wisely: A bar graph built of stacked elephants, for example, might prove distracting — as well as unstable!
[Adapted from a white paper by Condensed Light LLC.]
