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In this video, the Stanford Visualization Group assesses the efficacy of various transition types, finding that animated transitions can significantly improve graphical perception.

Animated Transitions in Statistical Data Graphics via the Stanford Visualization Group (Jeffrey Heer, George G. Robertson)

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Circular Menu Interaction Source

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“A Good User Interface has high conversion rates and is easy to use. In other words, it's nice to both the business side as well as the people using it. Here is a running idea list which we're evolving. We continue to learn about what makes user interfaces good by trying these ideas on consulting projects with our clients and then sharing best a/b testing stories. After all, you can only improve what you can measure. Our goal is to build out a repository of evidence showing clearly which ideas work and which ones less so.” 

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Florence Nightingale (English reformer and statistician, 1820-1910)

Keep reading

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via Eames Office 

This film is an exploration of Charles and Ray’s design philosophy.

In 1969, curator Madame L’Amic of the Musée Arts Decoratifs in Paris, asked five international designers participating in the exhibition Qu’est ce que le design? (What Is Design?) to answer a series of questions about their field.

Three years later, the Eameses transferred slides to film to make Design Q&A, which shows images of furniture, toys, exhibitions, films, and graphics created over the years by the Eames Office.  

The voiceover features Charles answering the questions posed by L’Amic about his and Ray’s design process.  

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color relativity, in action!

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New information is no more than the discovery of new relationships among concepts which are already known.

Jacques Bertin, Semiology of Graphics

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John Berger and Susan Sontag discuss storytelling

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A Model of Success from David McCandless:  Information x Story x Goal x Visual Form

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“Interaction with objects develops perceiving and conceiving.” - Richard Gregory

With this in mind, would placing more importance on movement and interaction within data experiences help facilitate discovery?

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Donis A. Dondis A Primer of Visual Literacy

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The mind always functions as a whole. All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.

Rudolf Arnheim 

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Influence of Preattentive Processes on Comprehension

Preattentive processes are initiated when something new appears in our visual field but is outside of our conscious attention. For example, a person may be walking along a city street and perceive the shape of a sculpture in front of a building without consciously paying attention to it. Preattentive processes screen this sensory data so that its meaning is subconsciously recognized. If the person has a particular interest in sculpture, the sensory data is passed on to higher processes so that the sculpture will come under the scrutiny of conscious attention. Sensory data that is not used for further processing simply decays. Designing the visual structure of a graphic to take advantage of preattentive processes sets the stage for successful comprehension. A graphic's structure can influence how an audience perceives, recognizes, and interprets a picture. As education psychologist William Winn notes, "Comprehension succeeds or fails to the extent that the information organized by preattentive processes can be assimilated to existing schemata (mental representations), or that schemata can be altered to accommodate that information.” This is because the bottom-up flow of information initiated by sensory input quickly influences and interacts with the top-down flow of information guided by our preexisting knowledge and expectations.

Connie Malamed Visual Language for Designers: Principles for Creating Graphics that People Understand

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Human Behavior: Selective Attention and Cost-Benefit Analysis

Selective attention is a long-known human behavior in which people focus on a particular object and ignore other information that they perceive to be irrelevant. For example, imagine you are in a noisy restaurant where the tables are positioned very close to one another. You can clearly hear the conversations at adjacent tables, but you select to tune them out and listen specifically to your dinner companion. Or you are checking the weather in an app on your phone and purposefully look away from the animated advertisement and focus on the temperature and images of the sun and clouds.

Depending on the design, the situation, the individual user, and the past experience, certain elements on the screen (sometimes useful, sometimes useless) may get ignored. So selective attention may help or hurt users.

Imagine a user is reading the news on a news site. She’s very focused on the story and doesn’t look at the navigation at the top at all. Ignoring the navigation doesn’t hurt the user in this scenario because she doesn’t need to go anywhere else. But this same user, who was very engaged with the topic and wants to read more, is so focused on the More from This Author information at the end of the article that she doesn’t see the Related Links that appear at the bottom of the page. This last situation is an example where selective attention hurts the user.

Selective attention is also the result of a cost–benefit analysis, although this one is more ingrained in human nature and probably dictated by evolution. Every moment humans are flooded with stimuli, and it would be highly inefficient to pay attention to every one of them. If when crossing a street in Manhattan we paid equal attention to the fashionistas’ outfits and the aromas wafting from the garbage cans as we did to the traffic, we might not move fast enough to get out of the way of that yellow taxi bowling toward us. Humans have learned to pay attention first and foremost to the important stimuli and ignore stimuli that were proven less menacing or interesting by prior encounters.

On the web, our prior experience has taught us that banners, navigation menus, search, and other chrome often appear at the top of pages. As a result, we tend to ignore banners and anything that looks like advertisements, unless we are specifically looking for deals or suggestions, and focus on the region where we expect the content to be.

Kara Pernice Why Designers Think Users Are Lazy: 3 Human Behaviors Full Article