DESIGNING VISUALIZATION TOOLS FOR LEARNERS

(Rahul Bhargava and Catherine D'Ignazio)

Communicating with data is becoming popular in fields far beyond data science, statistics and graphic design. People working in government, journalism, education, nonprofits, and the arts are working with data. What this means is that there are many newcomers to the field who are not familiar with the process, vocabulary and methods. Currently our tools do not support them well.

It's not for lack of tools. There has been a proliferation of tools created to assist novices in gathering, working with, and visualizing data. We have logged more than 500 such tools and the list keeps growing. But one of the challenges for new learners is that designers have prioritized features that quickly create strong visuals, at the expense of tools that scaffold a process for learners.

In this talk Catherine and Rahul will take you through a quick tour of this tool universe from the perspective of learners new to data analysis and visualization. They will show their four design principles for learner-centered data tools and give examples of those principles in action.