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The science behind good charts
It’s difficult to imagine a world of business communication without charts – but just how effective are we at reading them?
Charts use a variety of visual encoding methods – for example, position, length, area, angle and colour – to translate the data being presented into the ink, or pixels, on a page. But these encoding methods are not necessarily equally effective in allowing a reader to spot important variations in numbers.
In 2019, together with my colleagues Cale Tilford and Caroline Nevitt, I decided to run a little online experiment with readers of the Financial Times.
Many FT readers are immersed in the ...
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