Why and How to create visualizations

The way the human brain forms knowledge

 There are around 100 Billion neurons in the human brain. The human brain can store around 2.5 million GB of data. The human brain mostly gains knowledge from perception. Eyes and ears are the sensory for perceiving the world. human working memory forms the knowledge by organizing the perceived data. 

As we all know that the main goal of the visualization is to gain insights from the data. The information gained from data further leads to knowledge and the knowledge leads to insights into the data. Just having information is not power. 

The following illustration is provided by David Somerville:

Therefore the visualization helps in speeding up the cognition process for humans. This will help to make the tough decisions more rapidly for organizations. 

How Visualizations are created 

visualization is like a tool for gaining insights a person with this tool can make decisions much faster. visualization needs 3 important things: 

1) Data

2) Story or  Function 

3) Design 

combining the above three things together we can make good visualizations and gain knowledge.

In terms of the Venn diagram it looks like this:

Types of Data Visualizations:

visualization can be classified as static and interactive. 

1) Charts 

2) Graphs 

3) Concept maps 

4) Diagrams.

in interactive visualization, we can filter the data change variables and scale, zoom in or out. It's either controlled by the user or it might be an animation.