2022 Introduction to Statistics in Research Mitchell 2nd ed

I N T R O T O R E S E A R C H : D A T A V I S U A L I Z A T I O N & C O M M O N S T A T T E S T S

Text Preattentive Attributes

You can also use the concept of preattentive attributes in text. I used them in lots of ways in this book: bold , italics , color, size ,

separate spatially (like extra space around one sentence),

outline or enclosure (like the text boxes), and underlines. Understanding preattentive attributes is very important if we want to create visual hierarchy. If you violate the rules (like typing an entire text in bold), you could easily lose your auidence’s attention because nothing stands out. One other point should be made – design with colorblind in mind. About 8% of males are colorbind Vs. less than a half-percent of females (Colour Blindness Awareness, 2020). The general rule is to avoid using shades of red and shades of green (that’s scary when you think about the traffic lights, right?). If you are presenting to an international audience, you may want to review a book written by David McCandless where he considers the importance of colors in other cultures.

Title: Colours in Culture - at the Information is Beautiful Make sure to review if you are presenting to an international audience! By: David McCandless Link: https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours-in-cultures/

Something to think about: According to Knaflic, “we have about 3 -8 seconds with our audience, during which they decide to continue to look at what we’ve put in front of them or direct their attention to something else” (2015, p. 102). At least if we’ve leveraged preattentive attributes well, we’ve given a signal of what is most important.

In order to make the leap from theory to practice, we first need to look at other memory types.

Short-term memory This one is important for graph visualizers! People can only keep about four chunks of visual information in their short- term memory at a time. So, looking at this graph, we’re making our audience go from legend to component, to comparison of the different bands of color. Essentially, we are straining our audience by giving them a cognitive burden and we risk them giving up.

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