Design and Effects of Personal Visualizations

Abstract

R ecent research suggests that personal visualizations serve a variety of purposes, from data analytics to personal data management to promoting self-awareness and facilitating self-expression. 1 These visualizations often employ different design styles, depending on the target audience and the intended application context.Although existing design guidelines can help developers with general visualization design, 2,3 there are several features unique to personal visualizations that these guidelines do not take into consideration. For example, personal visualizations can provide users with visual cues to recall personal memories. 4,5 They can also promote self-awareness by providing real-time visual feedback to users, 6 or they can even be used as a medium for selfexpression. 7 These utilities are unique to personal visualizations intended for personal consumption and are gaining increasing interest from the public.Despite this growing interest, little research has focused on what elements are essential to the design of visualizations with these capabilities (see the sidebar for more details). These personal user experiences depend on the content of the users' personal data and their attitudes toward the data. This means that the effect of personal visualizations varies depending on the user, which makes it difficult to measure in a controlled setting.In this article, we present three distinct visu-alizations of Facebook data and a study of how users react to those designs. The three designs each represent a category of visualization-traditional, illustrative, and artistic-defined in earlier research. 8,9 The visualizations illustrate data such as the user's friends and posts, and messages, as well as their Like interaction with friends. The visualizations focus on three usage contexts:■ exploring the personal visualization of the user's own data, ■ comparing two personal visualizations based on the same design (one displaying the user's data, and another displaying the user's friend's data), and ■ analyzing a series of personal visualizations based on the same design and then inferring patterns and identifying outliers.Our analysis of the study data shows that the visualization design profoundly impacts the user's experience. The results suggest that, although traditional designs can provide detailed information in an easy-to-understand form, they tend to be less effective for triggering personal memories and inspiring self-awareness in the viewer. The more abstract visualization types are better at motivating users to explore the data and help users to form novel insights into their own behavior. We also found that the abstract visualizations impose additional difficulty for determining concrete data, which suggests directions for future study.Through our extensive user study, we derive implications on how visualization design affects the visualization's utility with respect to the user's sub-In an effort to determine what elements need to be considered when designing personal visualizations, this research study ...

"A Postcard from Your Food Journey in the Past"

“…We presented the nutrition and emotion encoding schemes separately to the participants to check the interpretability of our visual encoding. To further validate our encoding design decisions, we enlarged the element candidates pool by including other possible elements (e.g., "fower", "fruit", "pond", "ground" for nutrition encoding; "sunny weather with a huge sun" for emotion encoding) employed by previous literature [14,24,37,65,69,78]. Therefore, the total number of data categories and potential visual elements were unequal.…”

Go and Grow

“…For example, Wang et al [38] used a flower metaphor for visualizing Facebook data, and found that virtual representations of living entities could trigger insights. While some studies showed that virtual metaphors can motivate people to change their behaviour [4,22], others argue that their impact on a person's motivation and behaviour remains unclear [9].…”

Visualizing Excitement of Individuals and Groups

“…While many techniques based on physiological measures have already been used to estimate excitement levels in individuals, there are few systems that focused on raising awareness and visualizing these emotional states. Part of the area of personal visualization [18,33], emotion visualization is one of the approaches used to inspect and interpret information about user and group affective states.…”