06. What Experts Say About Visual Encodings

Experts and researchers have determined the types of visual patterns that allow humans to best understand certain information. In general, humans are able to best understand data encoded with positional changes (differences in x- and y- position as we see with scatterplots) and length changes (differences in box heights as we see with bar charts and histograms).

Alternatively, humans struggle with understanding data encoded with color hue changes (as are unfortunately commonly used as an additional variable encoding in scatter plots - we'll study this in upcoming concepts) and area changes (as we see in pie charts, which often makes them not the best plot choice).