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The scene is total chaos: a woman and all her purse's contents in middair as she trips over a child's toy, a man hastily trying to gather his spilled laundry, a screaming child weaving through the crowd. Somewhere, in the midst of it all, is the person you've been looking for: wearing a red and white striped shirt, black rimmed glasses and a lopsided cap. There he is! There's Waldo.

Many of us have fond memories of Waldo. But while he looms large in our imagination, our childhood searches for Waldo typically stayed pretty small – Waldo is a tiny person in the middle of lots of other tiny things.

And that's what this post is about: wee things. Specifically, the wee things that we see as part of graphics, maps, visualizations (wee things in space) as well as the wee things we experience as part of interactions, navigation, and usability (wee things in time). This means everything from sequences of small graphics that help us make comparisons, to tiny locator maps that help orient us within a larger graphic, to navigation icons that give hints about how we should make our way around a page.

Waldo, and the eternal search for him, can actually tell us quite a lot about design. In many ways, Waldo is a great example of what NOT to do when using wee things in your own work. So with Waldo as our anti-hero, let's take a look at how people read and interpret small visual forms, why tiny details can be hugely useful, and what principles we can apply to make all these little images and moments work for us as designers.

Wee Things In Space
Probably the most immediate definition of wee things are things that are physically small: little things on a page. We see these all the time in news graphics, and we're probably familiar with some of their forms: small multiples, sparklines, icons, etc. I'll go into more details about all of these.

These visual forms work because they serve as extensions of our mind – they are cognitive tools that complement our own mental abilities. They do this by recording information for us to make use of later, lending a hand to our (pretty terrible) working memories, helping us search and discover and recognize. We'll take a look at one task in particular they are great at: letting us make comparisons.

Tiny sequences of graphics, also known as small multiples, are great ways to help our brains compare. They are so successful because we don’t have to rely on working memory – every bit of information is in front of us at the same time. This means that we can easily see changes, patterns or differences.

Here are a bunch of examples of small multiples in the wild – maps and planets, first lady hair styles and telegraph signals, food trucks, fashion color trends and dressing appropriately for different climates, the distribution of deaths in the 1870’s and last but not least, Bill Murray’s hats.
So, Waldo basically thwarts our preattentive processing. Instead, he forces us to use our attentive processing: the conscious, slow, sequential process that lets us focus on one thing at a time. This "spotlight" of attention might be good at letting us concentrate, but it makes us pretty bad at spotting Waldo. We have such a hard time seeing him (despite the fact that he's right there in plain sight) because he doesn’t stand out in any clear way, color or size or orientation.

And obviously there are reasons for why Waldo doesn't stand out – he is purposely hard to find because his surroundings were constructed to hide him. But in general, we don’t want our graphics or data visualizations to be this much work to understand. If someone had to search that hard to read the information in a chart or graphic, it would be a failure. So if you're in the business of displaying data, avoid the Waldo strategy.

Instead, take advantage of those preattentive features! In this graphic from ProPublica, the use of color draws your eyes to specific lines of red text.The grey lines are government claims about the succeses and results of the CIA's drone program. The red lines are the official statements that it doesn't exist (or rather, the government can neither confirm nor deny). The graphic uses the preattentive feature of color to call out these contradictions.