Building Responsive Data Visualization for the Web

Chapter 06 Data Design: An Abridged History

Until this point, you have not been considering how your content would affect your design. In this section, layout will still be a major contributing factor to how you design, but you will also begin to consider how your actual content (your data) impacts how you produce a product for end users. In this chapter, you’ll take a brief look at a set of useful terms for thinking about data visualization on the responsive web.

It’s important to understand the process of data collection and analysis to establish a baseline of what work needs to be done to find useful data, and what work needs to be done to turn big data into useful data visualization.

Learning From Data

Put your finger down on this paragraph and pause for a moment to look around you. There are concrete facts everywhere you look. You’ve touched one paragraph today. The dishwasher has been running for eight minutes. You have six pairs of clean underwear in the drawer.

These concrete facts are data. They lack assumptions or conclusions; they are simply things that you can observe and measure. Visualizing data can help you build information and draw knowledge from facts that may, on the surface, seem innocuous.

The things around you right now might not seem like they need visualization. They’re fairly straightforward. But put them in context. Your dishwasher running for eight minutes means that there are still 12 minutes left in its rinse cycle, and then 10 in its dry ...