Memorable data visualisations

From phys.org

With Harvard students Azalea A. Vo and Shashank Sunkavalli, as well as MIT graduate students Zoya Bylinskii and Phillip Isola, the team designed a large-scale study—in the form of an online game—to rigorously measure the memorability of a wide variety of visualizations. They collected more than 5,000 charts and graphics from scientific papers, design blogs, newspapers, and government reports and manually categorized them by a wide range of attributes. Serving them up in brief glimpses—just one second each—to participants via Amazon Mechanical Turk, the researchers tested the influence of features like color, density, and content themes on users’ ability to recognize which ones they had seen before

The researchers talk about what features were present in the more-memorable graphs, which tended to be visually dense and not to be of standard forms.

It’s good to see empirical evaluation of theories about graphics. However, as they admit,  ‘memorable’ may not be the right criterion. Even if it isn’t ‘memorable’ in the eyeball-bleach sense, memorability may not be a good proxy for informativeness.