Bringing perspective to your data with Designer
The human brain has a hard time figuring out what large numbers really mean. For example, the size of my country, Canada, is 9,985 million km2 or 3,855 million square miles. That sure sounds big, but we could make it more relevant by comparing it to something else that might help make it more relatable. If I am presenting to a European audience, I could compare it to the size of France and add that Canada is 149 times the size of France. Finding relatable comparisons for large numbers can be time-consuming but we can again turn to Designer to help us, thanks to Microsoft Research’s Perspectives Engine.
To see how it works, let’s start with a simple example where I have added a title placeholder, Commercial planes fly at 30,000 feet (Figure 5.17). The Designer feature supplied a list of design ideas, and I applied the first one (1). First of all, it was great to have a nice-quality image supplied just because the word...
