Speaking Visually
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“It is to “appeal to the eye” that provides “the best and readiest method of conveying a distinct idea.”
- William Playfair, the ‘Father of Data Visualization’
It’s hard to understand how we can “see” information or how we came up with an idea. That’s been the key challenge for designers today and leaders from before; showing others how we came up with a plan. We can only see this now because of advancements of thought and “visual representation” developed by mathematicians hundreds of years ago. And this change in how we can “see” information is what made us push general knowledge and learning as a public right.
The challenge though wasn’t always “how do we get people to understand?”. It used to be “what do people need to know?”. Throughout history, people have been expected to be able to understand large amounts of data and come to a decision quickly. This is normally fine, until the invention of the internet and mass press was established. Now our public is pestered with an overload of information that can be too difficult to understand at once.
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The fact is: There’re too many facts.
Why we developed visual representation is a long history that centers around mathematicians and public servants trying to push markets to expand around the world. Yet that doesn’t explain why people still need visual representation now. In fact, the reason we need it now isn’t because people don’t read: It’s because reading has always been the difficult problem.
1. People did not always read.
Basic literacy wasn’t important to the public until the early 1900’s; that was because factories made people sign contracts and read safety signs. For most of history, people only communicated with pictures and broad shapes. So being able to read more than one piece of information was a skill reserved only to the rich and official civil servant class.
Now that basic literacy is a functional skill that every personal needs, it’s not pressured for people to be able to read more than one source for facts. Generally, the majority of people get their news and facts from only one source and don’t actively read from multiple news sources. Therefore our current “reading culture” is to trust one source exclusively for all of our facts and information.
2. People don’t like reading.
It’s not about preference or disinterest, reading is work for our minds that takes a lot of effort and skill. It has to engage our functional memory along with our projectional skills and socio-cultural information to decode information and apply it in our minds. And now that there’s an abundance of reading resources both online and offline, reading for information has become a skill that requires having to source information from multiple sources and around different parts of one topic! Which people do not like to do.
To get the general public interested in engaged reading, where they focus on a piece of written content, we need to entice them in multiple ways. Most people engage with reading if there’s an added audio-visual element, where they can read and listen at the same time or have added visual cues to enhance their engagement. Finding readers and getting them to continue to come back is therefore a multi-sensory effort in making people want to keep engaging with your content.
3. People don’t like it when too many voices are speaking.
A part of the reason most people only use one source for their information is because we don’t like too many conflicting opinions. It’s linked to our pattern of listening, in which we need to engage our “active listening” skills to focus on one conversation with one or two people. Since our brains are hard wired to focus on one source of information at a time, too many sources make us uncomfortable and unable to remember what’s being said.
While this research is related to speakers and oral communication, the same process can be linked to reading and research. Too many sources of information or facts won’t make an answer clearer. Because you have to keep going to back to remember the source of the information and what its context is, it only adds “clutter” to your process reasoning skills. Making it harder to form a single opinion and only pushing you to settle on one single piece of information to explain your answer.
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4. People can’t remember everything they read.
We generally only remember 1/4th* of what we learn over the course of a day*. While repetition and constant reminders help, no person can remember every single detail around a subject along with where they learned it from.
Organizing information is an important skill for both writers and readers; one that isn’t widely taught or practiced because it involves having to analyze large sources of information and then repeat it back in a summarized form. We may practice this skill routinely at school when we’re learning to read and write reports, but to do the same thing in day-to-day life with both quantitative and qualitative data is exhausting. It’s a time and energy consuming practice that some people CAN’T or WON’T be able to do.
*This number came from Dr. Ralph Nicolas during his study on listening and memory in the early 2000s. Communication studies suggest that this number can be applied to multiple forms of communication related memory.
5. It’s not easy coming to a conclusion.
Factoring all of the data in, having notebooks full of notes and tabs open for reference - It’s still very difficult for any reader to come to a decision with too much information.
Information overload is real in the sense that it can keep you from making a decision and plan for action. When you have too many facts and general figures, it will confuse the senses and leave it difficult to come up with a strategic plan. This is why we tend to form opinions with very little data, because it’s easier to understand with only a select amount of information.
The history of how we use to learn before reading is long and visual. It was often carried on from one source, like an announcer or a single leader, who would read from a book but show the crowd various flags and etchings. And this form of learning has continued on even today through newspaper pictures and posters showing visual clues to information.
So if someone is going to try and understand an issue, they’ll only want it from one source that is very visual. This is why speaking visually is important!
Bright Design is in the business of data visualization, making your facts easier to understand. We know how to help you send your message across to millions of people, making them easy to understand and stand out from the rest of the digital crowd! Using your products and vision, Bright Design will help you communicate to everyone.
Citations
Rosenfeld, B. Origins of Graphs in Statistics. Vermont Mathematics Initiative .
Kumar, G. (2016, August 15). The Power of Visuals. Digital Information World.
https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2016/08/the-power-of-visuals.html
Ghausi , N. (2018, October 19). Sorry, Goldfish. Peoples' Attention Spans aren't shrinking. They're evolving. The Entreprenuer .
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/321266
Eklund, A. (2014, April 30). Listening to Understand VS. Listening to Reply. Andy Eklund.