Creating effective visualisations

Hadley Wickham
Rice University, USA

This half-day course will help you create better visualisations by teaching you about the findings from cognitive psychology that help us understand how the brain processes visual information. You’ll learn important principles that underlying all visual displays and find out about some common mistakes that lead to confusion and inaccurate perception. We’ll focus on four important principles:

 -   Match perceptual and data topology

 -   Make important comparisons easy

 -   Visual connections should reflect real connections

 -   Beware of animation!

The class will be a mixture of lecture and small-group activities, where you’ll apply your new skills to critique existing visualisations and suggest improvements. Bring along one or two visualisations that you’ve been struggling with.

While some of the examples will use the ggplot2 R package, this course is graphics package agnostic. You’ll be able to apply the skills you learn to any visualisation task, whether its in R or in another environment.

Workshop materials: http://courses.had.co.nz/12-effective-vis/