We don’t touch in this course goals or domain-specific tasks of data visualization on maps — the reasons are beyond the scope of it. But it is important to discuss quality criteria of visualization itself. In other words, we need to cover the tasks that we must solve as designers when we work with specific visualization, to make it effective for the business-purpose.
In most cases, to make visualization effective, we need to achieve the following:
- The user must be able to quickly identify and identify the properties of the objects on the map.
- The objects of different types or states must be quickly identified as different.
- The visualization must consider different scales and palettes of base map (for instance, light or dark mode).
- If there is a need to show multiple objects, especially multiple types of object (for example, both point objects, polylines, area objects and so on), the visualization supports this and, again, the objects must be still distinguished to support the differentiation, when the user “reads” (i.e. perceives) the map.
- The visual clutter in general must be minimized.