Latest newsletter with a critical review of a new paper on the relationship between trust and beauty; podcast season #10 preview; things I'm reading; and more.
In practice, I don't know how to determine if a graph is "beautiful" or not; this sounds subjective to me. But there are certainly well-established UI/UX design principles that indicate best practices for communicating information, and the graphs that you describe as "beautiful" are those that conform to these best practices. In particular, the graphs of the Belgium agribusiness lobbying follow this pattern: for instance, it's hard to read the text and captions of the "non-beautiful" graph on Belgian agribusiness lobbying, while the "beautiful" graph is easier to comprehend. So I'm not so sure that it's helpful to frame this in terms of aesthetics, but I find it very plausible that people tend to trust information that is communicated more effectively.
By the way, I ordered your Excel book from Amazon, and I look forward to learning from it!
Thanks, Theodore. I totally agree with you--beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so how can we measure the correlation between it and anything else? Just hard for me to know.
I hope you like the book! Please let me know if you have any questions!
In practice, I don't know how to determine if a graph is "beautiful" or not; this sounds subjective to me. But there are certainly well-established UI/UX design principles that indicate best practices for communicating information, and the graphs that you describe as "beautiful" are those that conform to these best practices. In particular, the graphs of the Belgium agribusiness lobbying follow this pattern: for instance, it's hard to read the text and captions of the "non-beautiful" graph on Belgian agribusiness lobbying, while the "beautiful" graph is easier to comprehend. So I'm not so sure that it's helpful to frame this in terms of aesthetics, but I find it very plausible that people tend to trust information that is communicated more effectively.
By the way, I ordered your Excel book from Amazon, and I look forward to learning from it!
Thanks, Theodore. I totally agree with you--beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so how can we measure the correlation between it and anything else? Just hard for me to know.
I hope you like the book! Please let me know if you have any questions!