Four Experiments on the Perception of Bar Charts

Talbot, Justin; Setlur, Vidya; Anand, Anushka

doi:10.1109/tvcg.2014.2346320

Cited by 105 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…For both, linear and radial separate charts, we found that users underestimated value differences. This reinforces that lengths comparisons are easier when the bars are horizontally aligned, thereby confirming previous results [15,31,47,50].…”

Section: ×12-hours Vs 1×24-hours Chartsupporting

confidence: 90%

A Comparison of Radial and Linear Charts for Visualizing Daily Patterns

Waldner

Diehl

Gračanin

et al. 2019

IEEE Trans. Visual. Comput. Graphics

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Radial charts are generally considered less effective than linear charts. Perhaps the only exception is in visualizing periodical time-dependent data, which is believed to be naturally supported by the radial layout. It has been demonstrated that the drawbacks of radial charts outweigh the benefits of this natural mapping. Visualization of daily patterns, as a special case, has not been systematically evaluated using radial charts. In contrast to yearly or weekly recurrent trends, the analysis of daily patterns on a radial chart may benefit from our trained skill on reading radial clocks that are ubiquitous in our culture. In a crowd-sourced experiment with 92 non-expert users, we evaluated the accuracy, efficiency, and subjective ratings of radial and linear charts for visualizing daily traffic accident patterns. We systematically compared juxtaposed 12-hours variants and single 24-hours variants for both layouts in four low-level tasks and one high-level interpretation task. Our results show that over all tasks, the most elementary 24-hours linear bar chart is most accurate and efficient and is also preferred by the users. This provides strong evidence for the use of linear layoutseven for visualizing periodical daily patterns.

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Section: ×12-hours Vs 1×24-hours Chartsupporting

confidence: 90%

A Comparison of Radial and Linear Charts for Visualizing Daily Patterns

Waldner

Diehl

Gračanin

et al. 2019

IEEE Trans. Visual. Comput. Graphics

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“…Task Completion: The lower rating for Task 1 is little surprising, as it is difficult to precisely compare the length of bars that are not aligned, i.e., have varying start and end points [31]. For that reason, the expert users could have solved Task 1 more efficiently with a simple SQL statement than with the visualization.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual monitoring of process runs: An application study for stored procedures

Meyer

Beck

Lohmann

2016

2016 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis)

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Stored procedures are used in database systems to process and aggregate data. Hundreds of stored procedures often form a complex process network with documented and hidden dependencies that is difficult to understand, maintain, and debug. This paper introduces a novel approach to support such tasks by visually comparing a specific process run to other runs of the same process. The visualization is based on a force-directed node-link diagram arranged on a timeline. Color coding, histograms, and trend charts are used to highlight temporal deviations. The approach has been implemented as an interactive web application and used by professional database developers for solving realistic maintenance and debugging tasks. The feedback of these expert users confirms the usefulness and practical relevance of the approach.

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“…There is a body of work that specifically investigates the perception of bar charts. Talbot et al have taken Cleveland and McGill's study and delved deeper into the questions of how different bar chart configurations impact accuracy [TSA14].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The charts display three values each, labeled A, B, and C for reference in the questions. We constrain the bars to three to contain the scope of the study to issues caused directly by the embellishments, avoiding compound issues that may appear when two compared bars have many bars between them (as found by Cleveland and McGill [CM84] and Talbot et al [TSA14]). The minimum value on the y‐axis always starts at 0, while the maximum y‐axis value is capped at 100.…”

Section: Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

An Evaluation of the Impact of Visual Embellishments in Bar Charts

Skau

Harrison

Kosara

2015

Computer Graphics Forum

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A B C 0 100 (a) Bars extend below zero line. A B C 0 100 (b) Triangle bar chart.Figure 1: Two examples of embellished charts and abstracted versions of the embellishments. AbstractAs data visualization becomes further intertwined with the field of graphic design and information graphics, small graphical alterations are made to many common chart formats. Despite the growing prevalence of these embellishments, their effects on communication of the charts' data is unknown. From an overview of the design space, we have outlined some of the common embellishments that are made to bar charts. We have studied the effects of these chart embellishments on the communication of the charts' data through a series of user studies on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. The results of these studies lead to a better understanding of how each chart type is perceived, and help provide guiding principles for the graphic design of charts.

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Four Experiments on the Perception of Bar Charts

Cited by 105 publications

References 12 publications

A Comparison of Radial and Linear Charts for Visualizing Daily Patterns

A Comparison of Radial and Linear Charts for Visualizing Daily Patterns

Visual monitoring of process runs: An application study for stored procedures

An Evaluation of the Impact of Visual Embellishments in Bar Charts

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