3.30 Perception/decoding: Visual tasks and channels/mappings

• Insights (Healy 2018, Ch. 1.4)
  • Getting worse: comparison on a common scale → length-based comparisons → angles → areas (latter even worse than pie charts)
  • Acute angles tends to be underestimated, and the size of obtuse angles overestimated
  • Area-based comparisons of quantities are easily misinterpreted or exaggerated (e.g., from length to squares for surface of shape)
  • Problems increase in three-dimensional spaces

References

Healy, Kieran. 2018. Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction. Princeton University Press.