40-Issue 3

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/2633046

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Browsing 40-Issue 3 by Subject "Empirical studies in visualization"

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    Color Nameability Predicts Inference Accuracy in Spatial Visualizations
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Reda, Khairi; Salvi, Amey A.; Gray, Jack; Papka, Michael E.; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana von
    Color encoding is foundational to visualizing quantitative data. Guidelines for colormap design have traditionally emphasized perceptual principles, such as order and uniformity. However, colors also evoke cognitive and linguistic associations whose role in data interpretation remains underexplored. We study how two linguistic factors, name salience and name variation, affect people's ability to draw inferences from spatial visualizations. In two experiments, we found that participants are better at interpreting visualizations when viewing colors with more salient names (e.g., prototypical 'blue', 'yellow', and 'red' over 'teal', 'beige', and 'maroon'). The effect was robust across four visualization types, but was more pronounced in continuous (e.g., smooth geographical maps) than in similar discrete representations (e.g., choropleths). Participants' accuracy also improved as the number of nameable colors increased, although the latter had a less robust effect. Our findings suggest that color nameability is an important design consideration for quantitative colormaps, and may even outweigh traditional perceptual metrics. In particular, we found that the linguistic associations of color are a better predictor of performance than the perceptual properties of those colors. We discuss the implications and outline research opportunities. The data and materials for this study are available at https://osf.io/asb7n
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    Design Patterns and Trade-Offs in Responsive Visualization for Communication
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Kim, Hyeok; Moritz, Dominik; Hullman, Jessica; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana von
    Increased access to mobile devices motivates the need to design communicative visualizations that are responsive to varying screen sizes. However, relatively little design guidance or tooling is currently available to authors. We contribute a detailed characterization of responsive visualization strategies in communication-oriented visualizations, identifying 76 total strategies by analyzing 378 pairs of large screen (LS) and small screen (SS) visualizations from online articles and reports. Our analysis distinguishes between the Targets of responsive visualization, referring to what elements of a design are changed and Actions representing how targets are changed. We identify key trade-offs related to authors' need to maintain graphical density, referring to the amount of information per pixel, while also maintaining the ''message'' or intended takeaways for users of a visualization. We discuss implications of our findings for future visualization tool design to support responsive transformation of visualization designs, including requirements for automated recommenders for communication-oriented responsive visualizations.
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    Public Data Visualization: Analyzing Local Running Statistics on Situated Displays
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Coenen, Jorgos; Moere, Andrew Vande; Borgo, Rita and Marai, G. Elisabeta and Landesberger, Tatiana von
    Popular sports tracking applications allow athletes to share and compare their personal performance data with others. Visualizing this data in relevant public settings can be beneficial in provoking novel types of opportunistic and communal sense-making. We investigated this premise by situating an analytical visualization of running performances on two touch-enabled public displays in proximity to a local community running trail. Using a rich mixed-method evaluation protocol during a three-week-long in-the-wild deployment, we captured its social and analytical impact across 235 distinct interaction sessions. Our results show how our public analytical visualization supported passers-by to create novel insights that were rather of casual nature. Several textual features that surrounded the visualization, such as titles that were framed as provocative hypotheses and predefined attention-grabbing data queries, sparked interest and social debate, while a narrative tutorial facilitated more analytical interaction patterns. Our detailed mixed-methods evaluation approach led to a set of actionable takeaways for public visualizations that allow novice audiences to engage with data analytical insights that have local relevance.