The Power of Pre-attentive Attributes

 

Completing the Data Saber Program has been an intense affair. Given that most of the contents and learning materials are available only in Japanese, it has stretched my linguistic capabilities to the breaking point.

I’m very much on the liberal arts side of language proficiency. I admit that finance, data science, and similar business fields are not my forte (even in English), so I found myself struggling not only to learn a new software from the ground up but also simply to understand at a word-by-word level what was being taught to me.

And yet it is for that exact reason I find data visualization to be so powerful, because this program taught me that proper output of visualized data shouldn’t really require second language proficiency. Done right, visualized data is, well, visual.

The section on pre-attentive attributes really got me interested. It’s so profoundly intuitive that many people don’t even notice they’re being influenced by these attributes.

Of course, the program discusses pre-attentive attributes in the context of data visualization, but we experience these attributes in all forms of media. Take this blog post for example: if I want to draw your eyes to this string of text, I can do that by adding bold formatting (taking advantage of the “width” and “saturation” attributes); or, if I want you to read this part in a different voice, that’s easily taken care of through italicization (capitalizing on the “orientation” attribute); I can even influence your opinion and make you feel like blue text is good while red text is bad by assigning colors to emotionally charged words (thank you, “color” attribute).

These kinds of attributes come into play very strongly in all forms of media, including advertising, product design, and even news publications. Tableau is basically the answer to “well, then why not data, too?” 

Tableau and the Data Saber Program taught me that data should never be presented as a vast table of monochromatic numbers and percentages; it should be given color, emphasis, shape, and form that helps tell the story you want it to tell. It demystifies the task of interpreting large quantities of data, allowing the viewer to make more educated decisions about what they’re observing thanks to intuitive reasoning brought along by pre-attentive attributes.

This public Viz of mine was a great opportunity to explore more how pre-attentive attributes can speed up the viewer’s understanding of the data. I found that length, color, and saturation were very easy to work with, and I hope to continue making my Vizzes even more intuitive while I continue my journey as a Data Saber.