Abstract
This chapter makes a review on the progress of two growing areas in the field of communication: information visualization and usability. Information visualization has experimented a lot of changes during the last few years, especially with its arrival to the Internet and the development of different narrative forms by taking advantage of the main characteristics of the new environment. Something similar has occurred with the concept of usability. The following sections explore the significance of this young idea whose spread took place especially with the start of the Internet. With the objective of completing this theoretical framework, a small usability test was conducted with five renowned visualizations. The results of this test show that even the most salient journals do not fulfill many of the main usability recommendations. Hence, this area still has a considerable way to go regarding its appliance to information visualization.
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Notes
- 1.
Published by The New York Times in 2014 and awarded in 2015. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/12/world/middleeast/the-iraq-isis-conflict-in-maps-photos-and-video.html.
- 2.
Published by The Guardian in 2015 and awarded in 2016. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2015/sep/02/unaffordable-country-where-can-you-afford-to-buy-a-house.
- 3.
Published by The New York Times in 2016 and awarded in 2017. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/sports/olympics/usain-bolt-100-meters-justin-gatlin-results.html?smid=pl-share.
- 4.
Published by National Geographic in 2017 and awarded in 2018. Available at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/07/the-science-of-hummingbirds/.
- 5.
Published by Reuters in 2018 and awarded in 2019. Available at https://graphics.reuters.com/INDIA-POLLUTION/01008173281/index.html.
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Acknowledgements
This chapter is prepared within the framework of the project Digital native media in Spain: storytelling formats and mobile strategy (RTI2018-093346-B-C33), from the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Government of Spain). The project is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). This text is also prepared as part of the activities of Novos Medios Research Group (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, GI-1641), supported by the programme Consolidation and Structuration of Competitive Research Units of the Galician Regional Government (ED431B 2017/48). The author is also beneficiary from the Education’s University Faculty Training Programme (FPU), financed by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Government of Spain).
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Vizoso, Á. (2020). Information Visualization and Usability: Tools for Human Comprehension. In: Vázquez-Herrero, J., Direito-Rebollal, S., Silva-Rodríguez, A., López-García, X. (eds) Journalistic Metamorphosis. Studies in Big Data, vol 70. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36315-4_7
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