I was also a bit surprised by Stuart's lack of emphasis on figures. Having worked in 2 biology labs, I think most of the people I know who read or write a lot of papers agree that the figures are the most important thing to "read" first and the first thing to "write". When you have lots of data in a table (or ten), that is where the truth is, but it will tend to be very hard to interpret without scatterplots, error bars, tree diagrams, color coding, maps, and suchlike things.

One of the interesting things about the "figure first" advice is that an author (here I agree with Stuart) should write the first draft of a text starting with the details and building to the summary, but this is the opposite of the order in which an efficient reader should approach the same text. But next to the text is the figures, and here the order in which they are approached is probably the same. Look at them first, construct them first.

Maybe, the abstract is more important for online paywall considerations, like if it is all that many readers can get, and the abstract has to communicate that they should work to find the paper somewhere else? But if I'm reading a paper copy of Science or Nature then I go to the abstracts after the figures, personally. And even online, when I wanted to know whether the natural reservoir of Ebola had been found, the figure was the key thing and I found it via image search.

Now that I think of it... in my last startup, one of the founders would sometimes post to a blog for marketing purposes, and he made sure every single post had an image, because he had discovered by looking at the analytics that image searches that match "alt text" can pull in organic eyeballs like crazy.

Interesting. It really seems to be field thing - neither the maths nor the philosophy I did were much into figures.