Today, our desktops receive more information at faster rates than ever before. We’re bombarded with the equivalent of 174 newspapers a day -that’s fives times the amount of daily information available to us in 1986. That means that to be successful in today’s world, workers need to quickly digest often very complex information and data. As collaborators and presenters of such information, how can we not only grab someone’s attention, but also make the information easily understood?
Visualization can help.
As we’ve talked about in previous posts, the brain is predisposed to remember images. Why not take advantage of this?
To illustrate my point, let’s use Jess Bachman’s US Federal Budget example. What could be more complex than the U.S. Federal budget? Sure, the government publishes how it appropriates tax dollars but have you actually tried to track it all? The 2012 budget is 2,403 pages long. That’s a lot of stats to wade through. Jess condensed it to one page.
His poster Death and Taxes is a great testimonial to the power of visualization. It’s an attention grabbing and an easily digestible way of understanding admittedly complex information.
But don’t just take our word for it; check out Seth Godin’s blog post.