Annotation
People need to comment on, or draw attention to specific elements of a visualization without compromising legibility of that visualization.
Use when
Wanting to promote discussion of visualization details and sub-elements.
Solution
Give people the ability to make annotations that are consistent and are not disruptive in any way to the underlying visualisation.
Why
Being able to create non-disruptive annotations adds knowledge to the visualization, the use of non-disruptive annotations means that all members of the community are talking in the same visual language which makes community sensemaking an easier process.
How
Instead of giving people a set of drawing, arrow and box tools as can be found in some desktop software, provide them with a single method of annotating a visualization that is in keeping with the visualization approach used (eg. highlight bars in a bar chart, show the height of ranges in a flow graph).
Related patterns
- Tweaking
- Snapshot
- Data brushing (J. Tidwell, 2005. Designing Interfaces. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.)
