What Makes a Good Infographics
- What Makes a Good Infographics?
- Good infographers? :-)
Actually, there is no magic single thing that makes a good infographics. Infographics is always a product of a few technologies colliding: data analysis and data visualization meet writing or journalism and are expressed through design, illustration and/or photography. Therefore, good infographics is a good balance between many factors. Below I will try to overview most influential quality factors and rationale behind their importance.
Good Data
Rich, complete, normalized, consistent, verified dataset or story
Data or information are an essential basic material for any infographics, hence the obvious direct relation between the quality of data and quality of infographics based on this data.
Quality of data may be expressed as a combination of several characteristics:
- Completeness means the data is making a full dataset, and information is making a legible, consistent story.
- Richness is a way to speak about multi-variateness of the data or about content-richness of the information.
- Normality and consistency are important: they provide an overall picture that does not have weak cognitive points or irrelevant facts published next to relevant information.
- Unverified information devalues the whole infographics, it works the same as for the journalism.
Finely simmered data: all data flows exposed (including latent variables)
- All categories sorted
- Connections revealed
- Relations highlighted
- Sequences aligned
- Variables shown
Main message is clear and easy to grasp
As Leslie Poston of http://magnitudemedia.net puts it: "Relay solid information in a fact-based story arc leading to a single vital point or conclusion in a concise way using good, easy to understand graphics"
The information is neutral
It is important that the infographics' data is neutral and presents several points of view, offering a broader picture without bias and does not imply latent ideas to sell a certain product or idea. Advergraphics is not infographics.
Visual Display
Clarity and readability
Visual noise; cluttered data; non-readable connections or barely distinguishable (if at all) categories; abundance of bright colours where contrast is not used to highlight the important facts or parts; badly chosen decorative text that complicates the reading or small, unreadable text; huge size that does not give the viewer idea on the first sight; barely defined message - all these design flaws affect readability in a way that either worsens the perception or confuses the cognition.
Low lie-factor
Canonic Tuftean concept: "The representation of numbers, as physically measured on the surface of the graphic itself, should be directly proportional to the quantities represented." (Tufte, 1991)
The Lie Factor is “the size of an effect shown in a graph divided by the actual size of the effect in the data on which the graph is based.”
Low chartjunk (non-data-ink)
Concept of data-ink, explained by infovis-wiki.net: "Tufte refers to data-ink as the non-erasable ink used for the presentation of data. If data-ink would be removed from the image, the graphic would lose the content. Non-Data-Ink is accordingly the ink that does not transport the information but it is used for scales, labels and edges. The data-ink ratio is the proportion of Ink that is used to present actual data compared to the total amount of ink (or pixels) used in the entire display."
Aesthetics
Now we need to talk about attractiveness of the infographics.
A very popular argument suggests that nothing should be beautiful to be more clear, easy to understand or usable. Number of technically minded people refuse to research or apply aesthetics believing it is a harmful feature for anything user-centered or HCI.
However, there is a scientific research disproving the idea: an experiment of Noam Tractinsky on the correlation of aesthetics and usability shows that beauty of design clearly increases the usability of the product.
In short, our brains are designed to work better with(in) the beautiful environment rather than with(in) ugly or neutral.
Use aesthetics to help the viewers' cognition.
Styling
Illustration style and technique
Styling in infographics used as an implicit feature better expresses the meta-information and transfers the context. Choice of the style and technique that are semiotically related to the theme of the infographics enhances viewers' pre-attentive recognition.
However, placing style and decor in the focus of the graphics may affect the effectivity of the main message and turn the whole graphics into a chartjunk.
Design: layout, typography, colors and size
Aesthetics matter, and design factors are important not only as an expression of the data or information variables but as the perception aid.
For instance, good layout is not only essential in explaining the priority of relevant information (shown first, on the top of the page or in the center) but also directly correlates with speed of recognition of the main message.
Typography is a classic tool to differentiate between various metadata, and also heavily affects the readability.
Color is one of the main tools in breaking down the categories, and is a powerful tool in explaining the emotional/semantic context of the main idea.
Size should correlate with the production and as such badly chosen size worsens the readability and may become an instant turn-off for the viewer.
There is a constant design challenge of fitting appropriate amount of information into the ungenerous size of the screen, but it is somewhat rude to make viewers zoom in and scroll to grasp a slightest idea on the happening.