Before we conclude, I want to briefly recapitulate the key concepts that we covered in this module. First of all, we started with talking about visualization effectiveness, in the idea that studying human vision, applied human vision, helps us figure out how to make certain visual representations more effective. A key concept here is the fact that once we know or we understand better how human vision works, we can extract objective facts about whether something works better than something else, is not a matter of subjective taste. Some things in human vision and in visualization are objectively better than some others. That's a very important concept. Then, I started introducing the visual processing system, and one important characteristic out of this old system is the fact that the system discards a lot of information. So, we have a lot of information coming to our eyes. We always have the subjective feeling that we have a lot of information coming in, but in reality what happens is that most of this information is discarded, as I've demonstrated through a number of examples. Most of the information is discarded, and we retain only what is needed in order to accomplish a task. So, this is even more important or more relevant if we consider the fact that our eyes are structured in a way that we see areas in high resolution that is very small, that's the area that we call Fovea. But we also saw that our eyes can move very efficiently. So, even if we have a very high resolution in a very small portion of our field of view, we can move our eyes to detect information from different regions, and glue it together in a way that we have a sense that we can see the world in front of us at a very high resolution. We can continuously sample the world, and stitch together these pieces of information. Another thing we briefly touched upon is the role of attention on focus and what is retained. Attention plays a major role. That's by the way the reason why it's important for a designer to keep in mind what the task is that a person is trying to accomplish and what the visual queries are. Because attention is playing a major role on what information we attend to, and what information we retain in our memory. Very important. The last one is the idea of visual queries, the fact that considering explicitly what visual queries are is a useful tool for visualization design. Finally, the idea that there are some low-level vision processing that enables us to detect some visual characteristics very efficiently, whereas some others are not processed very efficiently by our brain. Which is something that we are going to discuss in much more details in the next module. So, I want to conclude with three main guidelines that are based on all the information that we have seen so far. The first one is motto or statement that I borrowed from Professor Tamara Munzner, who teaches visualization at the University of British Columbia. In her book on visualization design, she gives these guideline. Eyes beat memory. What does it mean? Well, it means that as we have seen, our eyes can move very efficiently. So, it's easy for us to gather information from a static image in front of us because we can move our eyes very efficiently. So, what is the consequence of that? The consequence is that if you want to show some information, it's advisable, it's a good idea to try to visualize as much information as possible because moving our eyes is much more efficient than moving our body. So, this is important for example, in interactive systems where sometimes in order to see some information that is hidden, we use interaction. So, this means that we need to use our body in order to see some information. Think about scrolling something or zooming in to something or panning an image, every time we do that, we are doing something that is much slower than moving our eyes. So, in general, we should try as much as possible to visualize as much information in one picture without scrolling, zooming or panning if we want to make sure that our readers or users are able to compare or detect pieces of information from different locations in the image. So, that's why eyes beat memory. That's a very important message. The second one is what I said before, the idea that making tasks and visual queries explicit in your design process is a very useful tool. In particular, is very important for you to ask yourself, what are the questions that the viewer has? What are the visual queries that are associated to these questions? So, that's my second guideline. The last guideline is to leverage the pre-attentive or tunable features that are available for visualization design. In order to use these guideline fully, you will have to first see our next set of videos on visualization, on visual channels that one can use or a designer can use for visualization design. So, this concludes this all module. We touched upon a lot of information regarding how the human visual processing system works. Before concluding, we need to switch our attention to another important concept. So, let me take a step back for a moment. So, what we are trying to do here is to map information that is in the data to information that can be conveyed graphically. Before I provide more information to you about how to do that, you need to acquire a necessary language to describe information in the data. So, before we move on to the next module, we have to cover information about how to acquire the necessary language to describe data, so that it's going to be easier for you later on to decide what are the best visual channels or visual characteristics to represent the type of information that is included in your data.
