Designing for an Audience - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 596

Each row represents an act and each profile picture is shown whenever the
corresponding character says something. It might have been more efficient
to represent each act as a bar chart, but that was not the goal of Lostalgic .
Although you can certainly draw insights about character relationships and inter-
actions, the purpose of the interactive is to provide a new look into the show
that fans can use to rewind and fast forward to the episodes they enjoyed most.

The details made the show fun to watch, so without them, the exploratory
visualization would not be as interesting to the audience it was intended for.

Note: More often than not visualization
rules are actually strong suggestions or make
assumptions about what you want to visualize
your data for. Keep these suggestions in mind
as you design data graphics, but also use your
own judgment to decide what works best for
your goals.

So although visualization rules are fine for guidance and to
ensure that others interpret your work correctly, you still
must decide when the rules apply and to what degree you
should follow them.

When you first learn visualization, it's good to learn the
rules of perception, structure, and layout. When you learn to
write, there are rules for grammar, sentence and paragraph
structure, and punctuation. This ensures that people can understand your
words. Whereas with visualization, you want to help people decode visual
cues to understand data; with writing you want to help people translate your
words to complete thoughts. However, as you write more or read your favor-
ite authors—even though a lot of the grammar stays intact—the rules don't
always need to be followed with an iron fist. Visualization, which is essentially
a visual language of data, works the same way.

PRESENT DATA TO PEOPLE

With misconceptions out of the way, now consider the groups of people who
look at your graphics. Visualizing data for various audiences means different
goals that depend on what you want people to see and interpret. Accuracy and
truth should always top your list of objectives, but this comes in many visual
forms as you present to one person, a hundred people, a thousand, or a million.

JUST YOU

This is an exciting part of the visualization process. Not only is it when you
get to explore your data to figure out what it represents and what it means,
but it's also when you get to play with shapes, colors, and layouts to see what