Visual display of information

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Visual display of information
Books by Edward R. Tufte The Visual Display of
Quantitative Information. Envisioning Information
Visual Explanations Beautiful Evidence The
Cognitive Style of Powerpoint Pitching Out
Corrupts Within Cheshire, Connecticut Graphics
Press
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Visual display of information
Image from the videotape Study of a Numerically
modeled severe storm, National Center for
Supercomputing applications, University of
Illinois (Tufte, Visual Explanations, p. 20)
Tuftes questions How big is the cloud? What
direction is it moving? What are the dimensions
of the grid?
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Visual display of information
Redesign by Tufte and Bushell (Tufte, Visual
Explanations, p. 21)
Restored quantitative information Directional
arrows Grid size given (and reduce the dominance
of the grid pattern) Time scale, with small
clouds depicting storm history
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Visual display of information
Chart prepared by Morton Thiokol for Challenger
commission. Tufte, Visual Explanations, p. 47

• Visual display problems
• Disappearing legend.
• The O-ring damage legend was on another slide.
• Chartjunk
• Obscures cause and effect
• Temperatures turned sideways
• O-ring anomalies depicted by scattered little
  marks
• Wrong order
• Date of launch rather than temperature

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Visual display of information Scatterplot of
temperature vs. O-ring damage
Tufte, Visual Explanations, p. 45
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Visual display of information influences mode of
thought

• Use of images tends to induce intuition
• Use of numbers tends to induce analysis