Visualizing Health and Healthcare Data

Chapter FourThe Research

Research Informs Data Visualization Best Practices

Data visualization relies on visual perception and interpretation, so understanding how and why humans see and perceive what they do is crucial to creating engaging, accurate, and meaningful data displays.

As Colin Ware, author of Information Visualization: Perception for Design, writes:

The human visual system is a pattern seeker of enormous power and subtlety … [that] has its own rules. We can easily see patterns presented in certain ways, but if they are presented in other ways, they become invisible. … Following perception-based rules, we can present our data in such a way that the important and informative patterns stand out. If we disobey the rules, our data will be incomprehensible or misleading. (Ware, 2020, xiv)

It, therefore, follows that learning visualization techniques grounded in research on human cognition and vision are essential to ensuring that the most important patterns, trends, and variances—the vital message and stories in health and healthcare data—are easy to perceive and understand.

Additionally, the abundance of stimuli continually bombarding us means that now, more than ever, data visualizers must study and understand the existing and emerging research about how the human brain processes visual information, and how the results of this research inform the best practices of data visualization. The window to get and retain attention for the important stories, and opportunities ...