Visual embellishment, sledgehammers, and flyswatters

The article Useful Junk? The Effects of Visual Embellishment on Comprehension and Memorability of Charts is the subject of some interesting discussion, e.g. here and here. My 2 cents follows:

The study is comparing the mosquitos-killing efficacy of sledgehammers v. flyswatters. For a graph with six data points, nearly any approach would work (even a pie!). For the presented cases, graphs are altogether unnecessary; a table or sentence would suffice: “Total House and Senate campaign expenditures increased from ~$50 to ~$300 million from 1972 to 1982!”

A more suitable visualization for any of these tiny data sets would be a sparkline, i.e. a word-sized graph. Effective design does not involve constructing vacuous and sprawling graphs (even well-formatted ones that make good use of color) to present virtually no data. Certain design principles are valued because they facilitate pattern-recognition and information processing among large quantities of data. Using Holmes-like embellishments to represent multiple data series with hundreds or thousands of data points would fail. This would be evident if the study took the opposite approach, namely selected exemplary data-rich graphs and converted them to Holmes-style graphs.

The article demonstrates that visual embellishments are more effective at marketing, i.e. having folks take notice and remember your message. (However, the study is based on 20 subjects, so I would be reluctant to draw even that conclusion.) If marketing is your goal, it’s no surprise that minimalist charts are not the best medium. Most of my work involves trying to makes sense of large quantities of complex, multidimensional data. And for that, I prefer not to use flyswatters.