Get to know your data or story intimately. Ask yourself
“What does my data want to look like?”
Based on info and graphics from velocitypartners.co.uk
1. Anatomy: When do you use it? Any time you want to educate about something with many moving constituent parts, which are not widely or easily understood.
Samples: Anatomy of a perfect website
2. Timeline: When to use it? Whenever change over time is your main point.
Sample: Call of Duty vs Battlefield
3. Maps: When to use it? Whenever you want to communicate proximity, distance and direction between a number of different items, or data points.
Sample: The Creative Process
4. Decision Tree: When do you use it? Decision trees are great for guiding people mentally and visually from an indeterminate starting point to any one of many different end-points.
Sample: Do I have to wake up yet?
5. Scale: When do you use it? Anytime you want to prioritize or rank a number of objects against a criterium that your audience will particularly like. Everything in the universe, no matter how unique, is on a sliding scale – we must just ask ourselves what the scale is.
Sample: The likability of angry birds
Mind Maps:
Here's a great student sample. After reading and discussing a section of their 11th grade English textbook, students were asked to pull out the big ideas and visually demonstrate what was important. These students used Popplet:
