Tracking focal points

1. Tracking focal points

Welcome! I'm Maarten, your instructor for this course. We'll follow up on the data visualization techniques you learned in previous courses, and focus on some design tips to make your visuals ready for production. In this chapter, we will look at things through the eyes of our users.

2. The Gutenberg layout

Various research studies have tracked eye movements over documents. One of the earliest studies resulted in the Gutenberg layout, which indicates that people start at the top left of a page and slide their eyes down and to the right when reading left-to-right languages like English. For right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic, flip the image.

3. The Z layout

Further research came up with a second layout: the Z layout. In this case, people focus at the top, scan quickly through the middle, and read carefully at the end.

4. The F layout

Jakob Nielsen performed more research in the area and noticed yet another behavioral pattern: people start off interested in reading an article, but as the interest wanes, they read less and less of it until they scan down to the end.

5. Focal points

You've probably heard of at least one of these layouts, and there's a lot of advice to lay out reports and dashboards according to them. But this advice misses the mark because those layouts are all intended for reading books or newspaper articles, not viewing visual-heavy dashboards. Instead, the right model is focal points. People move their eyes between large, colorful, distinctive elements on a dashboard until they find what they need.

6. The rule of thirds

We can use this knowledge, along with the rule of thirds, to position our visuals appropriately. The rule of thirds states that our eyes will naturally gravitate to one of the four white dots, positioned 1/3 and 2/3 of the way into an image, both horizontally and vertically. Our subject should align to at least one of those dots, rather than being in the center. For dashboards, this indicates that we might want to put our most important visuals on those thirds to draw the most attention.

7. The dataset

The dataset we'll use for the next two chapters is the Consumer Price Index data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. This dataset tracks inflation over time using prices of consumer products. The baseline of each series is set to 100 and moves up and down as prices change. The BLS does reset the baseline on occasion, creating a new series. Data ranges in our set from 1913 up to July of 2021. This data is broken out by type of consumer product as well as part of the country.

8. Our audience

Our audience is a research organization looking to understand inflation trends. They have done some work with Power BI but would like your experience in improving what they have.

9. Let's practice!

So now that we have our plan, let's go solve some problems!

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