Insights

Using design and visual information processing principles can help improve understanding of complex information. Read a selection of opinions, ideas and insights here.

ARTICLE: Nudging users through emotive design

August, 2024, published on Infogr8.com

Design is about emotions. Yes, even that KPI dashboard that you are working on for your client has emotional components. Just think about it; sales numbers going down? You show a downwards pointing arrow and quite likely some red along with it. Blue skies ahead? Everything looking rosy and peachy? You’re likely using colours, icons and visual metaphors to convey these feelings.

Recently, I participated in Future Fridays May workshop about Nudging users through emotive design. Having a social psychology background I was particularly interested in the subject and I didn’t know much about emotive design yet. Apart from it being a great workshop, I learned new things which I am sharing in this article.

> read the full article here

image credit: Dall-E

ARTICLE: On the psychology of dealing with numbers

July, 2023, published on Infogr8.com

If you work in data, you’ll no doubt be familiar with attention-grabbing headlines like this one: “Follow these 10 rules on how to improve your data dashboard, make it stand out from the rest, and communicate your data more effectively…”

Often with these how-to lists, I’m more interested in the ‘why’ behind the tips and tricks on offer. More specifically, I’ll end up looking into the psychological principles at the core of a better-performing piece of data design (in this case, a data dashboard).

I studied social psychology and wrote my master’s thesis on rational decision-making and heuristics. Although this was a while ago, insights from these fields are still relevant even after I’ve worked in market research and data visualisation for 15 years. In fact, studying how we interact with an overwhelming amount of information on a daily basis has only become more relevant today. So why should a dashboard be uncluttered, have a few large numbers (BANs) at the top, tell a clear story, and offer at least some additional insight or interactivity? The answers lie in how we make decisions.