-: Hey, everybody.
As promised, we're gonna talk
about pre-attentive processing.
And as you can see here on this slide,
one of the most important things
I can teach you in this entire class,
some of this, and probably all of this is gonna
be mostly new information for you,
but this should affect every single design decision
you make from here forward, not just in this class.
Every time you create any visual of any kind for anybody,
you should be thinking about pre-attentive processing.
But no pressure, right?
Okay, so let's talk about this.
I'm gonna show you an image really fast
and I want you to look at the screen,
I'm gonna count down so you don't miss it,
and think about what you see.
Okay, ready, here we go.
Three, two, one, there it is.
And that wasn't even fast enough.
If I ask you what you see, you're gonna say,
A jumbled lines, I don't know,
I couldn't make sense of it, right.
Now, if I do that again,
but now I apply design to that same image,
let's see what you see now.
Ready, here we go.
Three, two, one, there it is.
Now, what did you see, right.
I designed it.
I didn't remove anything, but by changing the color,
making it thicker, making it brighter,
I begged you, almost forced you to see
the one line that matters, my silhouette
for this set of lines, for this data.
So I can still leave all the other data there,
all the other lines, you know, give you that context,
but I can really draw your attention
to the thing that really matters.
So I'm doing this because I know
what your pre-attentive response is going to be.
What do I mean by pre-attentive response,
pre-attentive processing?
Here's the thing.
Every single visual experience you have
in your life occurs pre-attentively,
meaning before you're paying attention,
subconsciously, very quickly.
So every visual experience is like this.
So this morning, when you walked into, let's say,
a classroom or your kitchen to get a cup of coffee,
at that moment you had an immediate
subconscious understanding of the size of the space.
How many people were already there before you,
where there was room to walk around.
Every visual experience occurs this way.
Same thing when you look at a chart.
Yes, when you look at a chart,
subconsciously, instantaneously, pre-attentively,
you see that this bar is way taller than that bar.
You're judging it before you're even thinking about it.
This all comes from the field of gestalt psychology.
And there are some gestalt principles at play here
that help us understand this a little bit more.
One of them is called figure ground.
The basic idea here, all human beings will
subconsciously, pre-attentively see the figure,
meaning the object in the foreground,
in this case, the logo, and the ground,
meaning the background, the negative space.
So the FedEx logo is a very famous example
of figure ground being leveraged.
Now, I bet half of you already know the secret
in the FedEx logo, and half of you probably don't.
All of us who know it were told it.
So don't think that you should have seen this on your own.
It's okay.
No judgment whatsoever, I was taught this.
But look, between the orange E
and the orange X and what do you see?
Yeah, FedEx is a shipping company.
It's about movement.
That arrow is not a coincidence, it's not a mistake.
It's there for a reason.
Figure ground is used all the time in logo design
to reinforce a brand idea, okay.
So figure ground, negative space, positive,
you know, the actual figure, the object in the foreground,
what does it have to do with data visualization?
Well, here is what it has to do with data visualization.
Humans live on earth, Earth has gravity.
The mountains are down here, and the sky is up above.
So we naturally think that this stuff down here is the data,
and that the stuff above is the background.
Whether it's white and black
or black and white doesn't matter.
This is one of the reasons why we expect
low numbers to be at the bottom of a chart
and high numbers to be at the top of a chart.
Because things do go up like that, okay.
By the way, another thing to be conscious of,
we also expect low numbers
to the left and high numbers to the right.
We also expect bad stuff to the left and down
and good stuff right and to the up, just so you know.
Anyway, figure ground.
Not the most important gestalt principle,
not the strongest pre-attentive trigger,
which is why we all have to learn about the FedEx logo.
We don't see it necessarily on our own.
A much, much more powerful pre-attentive trigger,
gestalt principle, is the principle of proximity.
Every human being on earth will tell you
the dots on the left are one group,
the dots on the right are different group,
they're different from each other.
Even though these two dots share proximity, doesn't matter.
Because this dot, even though it's far away from this dot,
the entire group has proximity
and lacks proximity with this group.
We see this subconsciously, pre-attentively.
We cannot help it.
So position of objects we are very good at pre-attentively
seeing and essentially detecting variance.
This is why scatter plots work so well.
There's a bunch of dots over here,
and there's one weird one over there, outlier, right.
The dots are all clustered together on this line.
I see that pattern partially because of proximity.
Another one is the principle of similarity.
Even though this dot and this dot,
they're right next to each other, they have proximity.
But because of similarity, in this case color,
I assume this dot goes with this dot,
and this dot goes with without dot.
Subconsciously, pre-attentively, I see it that way.
Can't change that, okay.
There's also, this is by the way, why we use color
and or shape and or contrast
to show categories, groupings of objects.
Okay, again, scatter pot with a thousand dots.
Some are black, some are white.
I'm gonna detect the two groups, right.
That's the whole goal, when I look at a scatter plot
with two categories depicted that way.
there's a really interesting one called parallelism.
Everyone on earth will tell you that the three
parallel lines go together and the other ones are different.
Even a six month old baby who has not
taken geometry yet will tell you that, okay?
This is why line charts work.
I see lines and they're not parallel at all.
These are different.
They're going in opposite directions.
Oh, no, no, look how closely they're tracking together.
The line is telling me what the pattern in the data is.
Last but not least is the principle of common fate.
No proximity, no similarity, no nothing to tell
me what's going on with these data points
until I see that some of them share a common fate
through, in this case, animation.
So there's a limited set of things that we tend to do
in data visualization to reveal
trends, patterns and outliers to our audience.
Some of these are stronger
pre-attentive triggers than others.
Position, a very powerful pre-attentive trigger,
because of the gestalt principle of proximity.
Size, very good, although less so with circles
than with other objects like squares.
Length, very good, orientation, very good.
Others of these not so good,
and there's a lot of nuance around this.
I'm not gonna get into it in this lesson.
When you read Tamara Munzner's chapter,
you'll learn more about that.
But very helpful, like I said before,
to help us pick charts.
Now, a little bit more information behind this,
some research behind this stuff
that really helps drive it home.
This is the study that I mentioned earlier,
where we learned, one of the studies, where we learned
that humans look in the center of an image first.
These are eye tracking studies.
And if you have human recognizable objects in your graphic
like dinosaurs, people will look there next.
So lucky you, if you're making infographics about dinosaurs.
The rest of us stuck in PowerPoint land on the right,
creating charts and graphs with text,
the eye's all over the place, we don't know where to look.
That's okay.
But what we learned here is that there's
that fixation bias towards the center.
Therefore, it's all about the glance.
What do we see at a glance that's gonna
help us know where to look, to investigate
in this thing that we're looking at?
So given that, we can learn from a separate study,
which says if it's all about the glance, then you know what,
it must be all about your peripheral vision.
This study took a bunch of infographics like this one.
And they ran it through a simulation
of what you would see in your peripheral vision.
So imagine if you were looking at this red leaf
right in the center of this infographic.
If you were, this is what you would
see in your peripheral vision.
So the first lesson, your peripheral vision sucks, okay.
Second lesson, there's a case
for using regular monochrome boxes.
This is how the researchers phrased it.
What does that mean?
Well, the brown blobs full of content,
I still see they were there.
So I might look at those.
So you can see how this works, right?
There's also the case against using
irregularly placed decorative elements.
All the crap at the top,
all the junk at the bottom, it just blows up.
It doesn't mean don't use those.
No, it's fine, use those, they're pretty,
they're nice, whatever, but I may not notice
them in my peripheral vision, therefore they're not
going to draw my attention.
That's what this is all about.
Is it going to draw attention, yes or no.
So, by the way, I'm gonna have a little moment here,
a little bit of an aside, and teach you all
the biggest secret in all of design.
What makes this infographic so God awful?
I hate this thing, I despise it, it's horrible, it's ugly.
It makes me sad, why.
Now, some people will say,
well the color scheme's kind of gross.
Yeah, I hate this color scheme, but that's not it.
Some people may say the type color is kind of blends in.
Yeah, terrible typography in a hundred different ways.
Hate it, but that's not it.
You know what the number one offense
is of this disgusting piece of design?
It's the alignment.
Giant gap here, practically no gap here.
Medium size, smaller size.
The left hand edges of all these things
aren't lined up with each other.
Like there is literally zero logic.
It's like they threw a dart at the stupid computer
to decide where the different things should go.
This is right aligned text over this stuff.
This is centered.
This is neither centered nor right aligned nor left.
Like what on earth is going on here?
This is a header, nutrition facts.
These are subheads of that.
No type art, everything's terrible,
but especially the alignment, okay.
Even though, if you did not know that consciously,
subconsciously, this drives you crazy too.
Promise me, I promise you.
So trust me, alignment.
Simply line stuff up and your designs will be better.
All right, so back to pre-attentive
processing and this research.
So in this example, from the same research study,
the software is focused at the center
of this radial diagram. Keep an eye on the people icons
and these shapes down here.
People icons are slightly closer to the center
so they should hold up better.
Oops, no, they do not.
Does this mean don't use people icons?
No, it just means that this is why well-defined
cohesive graphic shapes are used so frequently.
Those simple shapes below have nice
solid edges and are simple.
They hold up better, your peripheral vision
struggles with weird shapes.
So use people icons, I love icons, go for it.
But if I really wanted to draw attention
to those icons next, like first essentially,
I would put them in a block of color,
the lesson we learned from the previous example, right.
And knock out the icons in a background color, right.
So last but not least, in this case,
the software is focused at the center of the bar chart.
Look at the Twitter and the Facebook logos.
Yeah, Twitter logo's slightly further away,
but not that much further away.
Once again, it's the weird shape.
That's why so many logos are squares
with a logo knocked out in the background color.
By the way, I don't know how many of you have
ever heard the acronym BAN in data visualization?
It's a very important technical acronym, B-A-N.
It stands for a big-ass number, okay.
Sometimes it's okay to use a big-ass number,
a BAN, on your designs.
Here we have $50,000, nice, bold typography.
It's good, there's nothing wrong with that.
But it doesn't perform so well
in your peripheral vision either.
So once again, if I really wanted to draw attention
to that number, I might knock
it out in the background color to really draw the eye.
Now, you can't knock everything on the background color,
'cause now the entire infographic
is a big giant block of color.
Now you're trying to emphasize everything,
therefore you're emphasizing nothing,
we'll talk more about that when we talk
about design in a later module.
So pre-attentive processing, very, very important.
This is how you experience your world.
It is also worth noting there is such a thing
as attentive processing, which also works.
So what does that mean?
It means if I teach you at the beginning of a data story
every time you see the color purple,
it means, you know, I don't know,
let's say it means mac and cheese.
I'm doing a data story about food.
Purple means mac and cheese,
and you know, orange means broccoli,
which by the way would be a terrible color selection,
because of course purple should mean eggplant.
And orange should mean mac and cheese.
There's another lesson there
about use colors that actually match the thing
if appropriate and relevant.
But in fact, let me use those examples.
It's probably smarter just to talk that way.
Purple means eggplant, orange means mac and cheese.
Once I've established that, I can go 47 slides later,
and on slide 47, you are primed,
you are ready as soon as that chart appears to see purple
and to know that means eggplant, and orange,
and that means mac and cheese.
When you are primed, in other words,
you're being attentive to color,
you will also very quickly see and detect patterns
and understand the stuff in the data.
So we'll talk more about this sort
of design and triggering responses, et cetera.
But do know that while your audience will by default
receive information and have that pre-attentive response,
if you prime them to a certain response,
they also will react to that well as well.
So yes, as I mentioned, you're gonna be reading
from this book Colin Ware,
"Information Visualization Perception for Design."
It's a fairly heavy academic book about visual perception,
and like I said, some technical stuff,
skim past the stuff that doesn't seem relevant to you.
You're not gonna be tested on this.
Just be aware of that whole idea
of pre-attentive processing, and there's more nuance
in his book than what I've covered today.
There's also the other book from Tamara Munzner,
which talks about the relative importance and hierarchy.
Definitely read that entire chapter,
'cause you'll definitely learn stuff there.
And yeah, I apologize that this is a lot
of reading this week, most of this class
is not about reading, but I think it's important stuff.
But like I said, you know, skim it.
You don't have to learn every single word
from either of these readings, but I think you'll know
what's relevant to you and what's less relevant.
Just remember what I've talked about here today,
and, you know, learn about that hierarchy
is also very, very important.
All right, thanks everybody.