1 research outputs found
A Qualitative Analysis of Common Practices in Annotations: A Taxonomy and Design Space
Annotations are a vital component of data externalization and collaborative
analysis, directing readers' attention to important visual elements. Therefore,
it is crucial to understand their design space for effectively annotating
visualizations. However, despite their widespread use in visualization, we have
identified a lack of a design space for common practices for annotations. In
this paper, we present two studies that explore how people annotate
visualizations to support effective communication. In the first study, we
evaluate how visualization students annotate bar charts when answering
high-level questions about the data. Qualitative coding of the resulting
annotations generates a taxonomy comprising enclosure, connector, text, mark,
and color, revealing how people leverage different visual elements to
communicate critical information. We then extend our taxonomy by performing
thematic coding on a diverse range of real-world annotated charts, adding trend
and geometric annotations to the taxonomy. We then combine the results of these
studies into a design space of annotations that focuses on the key elements
driving the design choices available when annotating a chart, providing a
reference guide for using annotations to communicate insights from
visualizations