Credit: By Luke Legay on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Data visualisations can shed a new light on a story or help reflect hidden angles, imparting information in a more visually appealing way that the reader is more likely to remember.
Using charts or diagrams can help convey or emphasise key takeaways from a story, but it can also confuse people if the illustrations are vague, too complicated or dealing with a lot of numbers.
Michelle Borkin, assistant professor in computer science at Northeastern University, recently conducted a study called 'Beyond memorability: Visualisation recognition and recall'.
Drawing from the study's findings, Borkin's colleague, John Wihbey, has put together a guide on Storybench, explaining why some data visualisation elements are more likely to be remembered by people.
The key findings include the importance of using text and titles to emphasise the message in a visualisation and the efficiency of using everyday things like pictograms to help people relate to the data and topic described.
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