Spotted: how differences in cognition and personality affect visualization - Understanding Visualization by Understanding Individual Users,

Understanding Visualization by Understanding Individual Users

Visualization is often seen as a tool to support complex thinking. Although different people can have very different ways of approaching the kind of complex task that visualizations support, as researchers and designers we still rarely consider individual differences in creating and evaluating visualizations. This article reviews recent research on individual differences in visualization and human-computer interaction, showing that both cognitive abilities and personality profiles might significantly affect performance with these tools. The study of individual differences has led to the conclusion that advances in this important area in visualization will require more focused research. Specifically, we must isolate the cognitive factors that are relevant to visualization and the design factors that make one visualization more suited to a user than another. In doing so, we could increase our understanding of the visualization user and reshape how we approach design and evaluation.

Find: Beautiful and meaningful - Watch the beauty of public transit unfold in New York, Boston, and other cities around the world

Watch the beauty of public transit unfold in New York, Boston, and other cities around the world

YouTube user STLTransit has a wonderful collection of videos that visualize the movements of the public transit systems of various locations — turning public transit data into a flowing display of a city's daily life. Each video shows the ebb and flow of traffic during a single day, with various transit systems like bus and rail shown in different colors. The result is a brief but exciting glimpse at our world — a satellite's view of a city's living protoplasm on the streets below.

Find: Robert Kosara's visualization history

Robert Kosara (@eagereyes) 11/26/12, 11:24 AM New on eagereyes: The Changing Goals of Data Visualization eagereyes.org/criticism/chan…