Exploring the Effects of Colouring Graph Diagrams on People of Various Backgrounds

Abstract

Abstract. Colour is one of the primary aesthetic elements of a visualization. It is often used successfully to encode information such as the importance of a particular part of the diagram or the relationship between two parts. Even so, there are few investigations into the human reading of colour coding on diagrams from the scientific community. In this paper we report on an experiment with graph diagrams comparing a black and white composition with two other colour treatments. We drew our subjects from engineering, art, visual design, physical education, tourism, psychology and social science disciplines. We found that colouring the nodes of interest reduced the time taken to find the shortest path between the two nodes for all subjects. Engineers, tourism and social scientists proved significantly faster with artist/designers just below the overall average speed. From this study, we contribute that adding particular colour treatments to diagrams increases legibility. In addition, preliminary work investigating colour treatments and schemes indicates potential for future gains.

A task-based evaluation of combined set and network visualization

“…The eight rotated visualizations had different names for the sets than those used in the original version, in order to reduce learning effect. We expected that participants would not recognize the rotated visualizations, evidenced in part by Plimmer et al's study were participants saw rotated graphs but, when asked, were unaware of this fact [33]. Lastly, all of the visualizations in this paper, except for Figs 2, 8, 9 and 10, are scaled versions of those used in the study, although some labels have been resized and moved for readability in the paper.…”