- Color maps are a specific type of data visualization
that maps colors onto quantities.
And based on this map, people recognize certain patterns
and results, and thus people can become more informed
about what the results mean.
- One kind of color map could even just be a square,
in which the square is broken down into even smaller squares.
And you can imagine that each of those individual squares
represent a time of day that you did an activity.
So you could just put the numbers, right?
So it took 12 seconds, it took 10 minutes.
But looking at all those numbers can make it really hard
to see if there's any kind of pattern
or kind of generally where it took longer
or where it took faster to do these different things.
So using visualizations to represent data
is really helpful to see patterns.
And so you can have then each of those squares
representing time or some value, and then each of those squares
could be colored a different color.
And so one way that color can be helpful then
is that you can look at that graph and just see,
"Oh, early in the day, it took a lot longer to do something
because I see a lot of darker colors," for example.