Why are some visualizations so easy to understand at first sight while others seem to be some sort of graphical puzzle? Why do some visualizations need to be relearned every time you see them again, whereas others need only one simple initial exposure?
I believe there are two distinct phenomena in this space that often get conflated: novelty and something I’ll tentatively call cognitive incongruence.
While, for sure many representations are confusing only at first sight and have a learning curve, it is also clear to me that some representations are confusing no matter how many times you use them
If we set aside the clear case of visual representations that are confusing only at first because they are novel, it would be interesting to understand better what makes some graphs confusing even after multiple exposures. It seems to me there could be interesting insights to gain from such an exploration.
An example of the second case is the burning embers I mentioned above. To me, they look a lot like bar charts, so when I see them, I try to read them as bar charts, which is the wrong mental model for them. A similar problem exists with connected scatter plots. I want to read them as line charts, but this is the wrong way to read them, so I get confused.
One hypothesis I have is that they evoke the wrong analogies, either because there is a mismatch between the visual representation and the information they represent or because there is a clash with mental models of similar representations we have acquired in the past.
different in different cultures
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