Graphicacy

One way to think of graphicacy is what is someone’s reading level for graphs. It doesn’t make sense to hand someone a novel far above their reading level. The objective is to use the simplest chart for the job. You don’t need complex visuals to communicate effectively.

Graphicacy can be examined across three levels.

Low

Charts catering to those with the lowest graphicacy are the charts we all are most familiar with. These would be your basic bars and line charts, and you generally find these in general blog posts.

Medium

At the medium level we find scatter plots, dual axis charts and maybe heat maps.
These charts do not require the reader to be a domain expert on the subject to understand what’s being displayed, but there is more information to digest. This types of charts are more common in work teams within the industry and organizations.

High

The highest-level of graphicacy are employed by students of visualization, practitioners or domain experts.
Typically, charts in this category include radar charts, treemap, network visualizations, connected scatterplots, or other custom visualizations. These types of charts are mostly found in research papers or highly specialized tools.

Additional Resources:

• Here is a website that uses charts that offer high graphicacy
• Check out this paper on graphicacy