storytelling with data: #50 data viz research with Steven Franconeri

“I want to be able to show it and say, doesn’t that feel good? And you know what? We actually know it works well, it’s not just your intuition.” In this episode, Cole talks with Northwestern University professor and director of the Visual Thinking Lab, Dr. Steven Franconeri. Hear about research that helps us understand and harness the limits of our visual system and how it can be translated into practical terms to help you design better graphs and dashboards. Cole and Steve discuss several recent studies, how to bridge the chasm between academia and practitioners, some of the unsolved problems of data visualization, and more. Related links: Follow Steve: Twitter | LinkedIn | Faculty page The Visual Thinking Lab Journal: Psychological Science in the Public Interest Paper: The Science of Visual Data Communication: What Works, single page summary Paper: Declutter and Focus: Empirically Evaluating Design Guidelines for Effective Data Communication  Paper: Visual Arrangements of Bar Charts Influence Comparisons in Viewer Takeaways  Paper: Measures of the Benefit of Direct Encoding of Data Deltas for Data Pair Relation Perception Uncertainty: FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 Election Forecast Book: The Thinking Eye, the Seeing Brain (James Enns) Book: Visual Thinking for Design (Colin Ware) People mentioned: Lace Padilla, Jessica Hullman, Jeff Zacks, Priti Shah, Christie Nothelfer, Cindy Xiong, Matt Kay