1,006 research outputs found
Understanding and Measuring the Effects of Graphical Dimensions on Viewers' Perceived Chart Credibility
Journalists and visualization designers include visualizations in their
articles and storytelling tools to deliver their message effectively. But
design decisions they make to represent information, such as the graphical
dimensions they choose and the viewer's familiarity with the content can impact
the viewer's perceived credibility of charts. Especially in a context where
little is known about sources of online information. But there is little
experimental evidence that designers can refer to make decisions. Hence, this
work aims to study and measure the effects of graphical dimensions and people's
familiarity with the content on viewers' perceived chart credibility. I plan to
conduct a crowd-sourced study with three graphical dimensions conditions, which
are traditional charts, text annotation, and infographics. Then I will test
these conditions on two user groups, which are domain experts and non-experts.
With these results, this work aims to provide chart guidelines for visual
designers with experimental evidence.Comment: Published in PacificVis2023, Poste
My Model is Unfair, Do People Even Care? Visual Design Affects Trust and Perceived Bias in Machine Learning
Machine learning technology has become ubiquitous, but, unfortunately, often
exhibits bias. As a consequence, disparate stakeholders need to interact with
and make informed decisions about using machine learning models in everyday
systems. Visualization technology can support stakeholders in understanding and
evaluating trade-offs between, for example, accuracy and fairness of models.
This paper aims to empirically answer "Can visualization design choices affect
a stakeholder's perception of model bias, trust in a model, and willingness to
adopt a model?" Through a series of controlled, crowd-sourced experiments with
more than 1,500 participants, we identify a set of strategies people follow in
deciding which models to trust. Our results show that men and women prioritize
fairness and performance differently and that visual design choices
significantly affect that prioritization. For example, women trust fairer
models more often than men do, participants value fairness more when it is
explained using text than as a bar chart, and being explicitly told a model is
biased has a bigger impact than showing past biased performance. We test the
generalizability of our results by comparing the effect of multiple textual and
visual design choices and offer potential explanations of the cognitive
mechanisms behind the difference in fairness perception and trust. Our research
guides design considerations to support future work developing visualization
systems for machine learning.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions of Visualization
and Computer Graphics (Also in proceedings of IEEE VIS 2023
Why More Text is (Often) Better: Themes from Reader Preferences for Integration of Charts and Text
Given a choice between charts with minimal text and those with copious
textual annotations, participants in a study (Stokes et al.) tended to prefer
the charts with more text. This paper examines the qualitative responses of the
participants' preferences for various stimuli integrating charts and text,
including a text-only variant. A thematic analysis of these responses resulted
in three main findings. First, readers commented most frequently on the
presence or lack of context; they preferred to be informed, even when it
sacrificed simplicity. Second, readers discussed the story-like component of
the text-only variant and made little mention of narrative in relation to the
chart variants. Finally, readers showed suspicion around possible misleading
elements of the chart or text. These themes support findings from previous work
on annotations, captions, and alternative text. We raise further questions
regarding the combination of text and visual communication.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted to the NLVIZ workshop at IEEE
Transaction on Visualization and Graphics conferenc
Interactive applications and rhetorical devices for guiding parent-clinician communication through data visualizations
Effective communication between clinicians and parents of young children can decrease parents' anxiety and discomfort, help them handle bad news and uncertainty, and improve their adherence to proposed interventions. Parent-clinician communication further has the potential to facilitate collaboration and increase parents' empowerment. However when communication involves a discussion of the child's developmental delay or challenging behaviors, parents experience an emotional strain as they discuss hopes and fears, developmental concerns, and feelings of distress. As a consequence, communication challenges may emerge such as denial and the parent's resistance against the information that the clinician presents. In addition to the emotional strain, parents also experience a cognitive burden due to medical jargon or presentation of data that is inaccessible to them. In fact, in most health care settings, parents reported their expectation of more accessible information than is currently provided. In order to address these challenges, I present data visualization as a method of facilitating parent-clinician communication.
This dissertation covers the cognitive perception and the practical application of data visualization in parent-clinician communication through: (1) rhetorical devices that are used to guide people's understanding of data visualizations, and (2) interactive applications I have built that explore the role of data visualizations in clinical communication. Through exploring cognitive and practical aspects of visualizations in communication, this dissertation makes three contributions. First, I showcase three interactive webtools that involve visualizations, and demonstrate that visualizations can facilitate family-clinician communication through overcoming 1) the emotional barriers by presenting children's behaviors to parents in an objective manner and 2) the cognitive barriers by acting as an anchor for conversation and presenting important developmental concepts or patterns that are hard to convey through words or text. Next, I identify features that make behavioral visualizations useful for various communication based tasks, such as displaying microbehaviors and providing a balanced representation of child-adult interaction, instead of solely focusing on the child behavior. Finally, I present visual and textual cues as rhetorical devices for shaping the message in the visualization and guiding the viewers through visualizations. These devices help reduce confusion and prevent miscommunication in visual-based communication as thus contribute to a more effective parent-clinician communication
Striking a Balance: Reader Takeaways and Preferences when Integrating Text and Charts
While visualizations are an effective way to represent insights about
information, they rarely stand alone. When designing a visualization, text is
often added to provide additional context and guidance for the reader. However,
there is little experimental evidence to guide designers as to what is the
right amount of text to show within a chart, what its qualitative properties
should be, and where it should be placed. Prior work also shows variation in
personal preferences for charts versus textual representations. In this paper,
we explore several research questions about the relative value of textual
components of visualizations. 302 participants ranked univariate line charts
containing varying amounts of text, ranging from no text (except for the axes)
to a written paragraph with no visuals. Participants also described what
information they could take away from line charts containing text with varying
semantic content. We find that heavily annotated charts were not penalized. In
fact, participants preferred the charts with the largest number of textual
annotations over charts with fewer annotations or text alone. We also find
effects of semantic content. For instance, the text that describes statistical
or relational components of a chart leads to more takeaways referring to
statistics or relational comparisons than text describing elemental or encoded
components. Finally, we find different effects for the semantic levels based on
the placement of the text on the chart; some kinds of information are best
placed in the title, while others should be placed closer to the data. We
compile these results into four chart design guidelines and discuss future
implications for the combination of text and charts.Comment: 11 pages, 4 tables, 6 figures, accepted to IEEE Transaction on
Visualization and Graphic
Same Data, Diverging Perspectives: The Power of Visualizations to Elicit Competing Interpretations
People routinely rely on data to make decisions, but the process can be
riddled with biases. We show that patterns in data might be noticed first or
more strongly, depending on how the data is visually represented or what the
viewer finds salient. We also demonstrate that viewer interpretation of data is
similar to that of 'ambiguous figures' such that two people looking at the same
data can come to different decisions. In our studies, participants read
visualizations depicting competitions between two entities, where one has a
historical lead (A) but the other has been gaining momentum (B) and predicted a
winner, across two chart types and three annotation approaches. They either saw
the historical lead as salient and predicted that A would win, or saw the
increasing momentum as salient and predicted B to win. These results suggest
that decisions can be influenced by both how data are presented and what
patterns people find visually salient
Polarizing Political Polls: How Visualization Design Choices Can Shape Public Opinion and Increase Political Polarization
While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating
cognitive tasks (e.g., learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively
little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values.
For example, could design or framing choices interact with viewers' social
cognitive biases in ways that promote political polarization? When reporting on
U.S. attitudes toward public policies, it is popular to highlight the gap
between Democrats and Republicans (e.g., with blue vs red connected dot plots).
But these charts may encourage social-normative conformity, influencing
viewers' attitudes to match the divided opinions shown in the visualization. We
conducted three experiments examining visualization framing in the context of
social conformity and polarization. Crowdworkers viewed charts showing
simulated polling results for public policy proposals. We varied framing
(aggregating data as non-partisan "All US Adults," or partisan "Democrat" and
"Republican") and the visualized groups' support levels. Participants then
reported their own support for each policy. We found that participants'
attitudes biased significantly toward the group attitudes shown in the stimuli
and this can increase inter-party attitude divergence. These results
demonstrate that data visualizations can induce social conformity and
accelerate political polarization. Choosing to visualize partisan divisions can
divide us further
Recommended from our members
Communicative Information Visualizations: How to make data more understandable by the general public
Although data visualizations have been around for centuries and are encountered frequently by the general public, existing evidence suggests that a significant portion of people have difficulty understanding and interpreting them. It might not seem like a big problem when a reader misreads a weather map and finds themselves without an umbrella in a rainstorm, but for those who lack the means, experience, or ability to make sense of data, misreading a data visualization concerning public health and safety could be a matter of life and death. However, figuring out how to make visualizations truly usable for a diverse audience remains difficult. In my thesis, I examined three areas where altering current practices may help make data visualizations more understandable and impactful in the future
- …