I enjoy designing maps and other data visualizations. It’s something that takes a lot of practice and I’ve found that I can learn a lot from posting mine online. As data visualization designers, it can be easy to forget what it’s like to see a dataset for the first time. Social media gives us a great way to collect that kind of feedback from a lot of people at once. One of the great things about social media is that I can get feedback from domain experts, interested hobbyists, designers, and other people who just happen to see my post all at the same time. I use my Twitter account to share work I’ve done or things I have in progress. Fairly reliably– and especially if prompted– people will respond with comments. In this talk I will discuss some of the lessons I’ve learned from these comments: creating better legends, choosing colors, and using text to add more information, for example. People listening to this talk will learn strategies for evaluating and learning from their audience, whether they’re creating graphics for the first time or have been publishing a blog for years. I think the ideal audience is beginners to intermediate, but anyone can walk away with new ideas for their work.
Bio: Katie works as a data analyst at Ookla. She enjoys working on data visualization, particularly map design.