Elaine’s Reviews > The Information Design Handbook > Status Update

Attention (or awareness must be developed -- audience must be cognizant of product/service)
Interest (must be generated so audience learns more about the thing)
Desire (must be created, evoking an emotional response)
Action (will then be taken by audience, eliciting the desired response)

E. St. Elmo Lewis, AIDA model of sales process

"Don't decorate, design" -- good phrasing

"Focus on clarity by doing the minimum necessary to convey each idea. Avoid anything that doesn't serve a function (decorative flourishes, unnecessary gradients, meaningless patterns, etc).

Wayfinding --
Too many signs = too many choices. Remember Miller's magic number (7 chunks +/- 2)

Difference threshold (weber) - magnify the just-noticeable difference into really noticable differences for clear info hierarchy.

Use grids, flow-lines, and typography to create familiarity in layouts. Consistent placement of content creates scanpaths to which viewer becomes accustomed. This helps them process the info more quickly.

Pattern Perception, Table Lookup

Oh, learning style theory. I was cutting some slack since the introduction on p. 55 said people "prefer" different inputs, but the following summary uses instead "learn best from..."

William Playfair, earliest charts & graphs to represent information
1786 The Commercial and Political Atlas
1801, The Statistical Breviary

"My quote is: 'The only way to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand.' It is at that moment that you can make something understandable."
- Richard Saul Wurman
from "The InfoDesign Interview" at informationdesign.org