The Not-so-Staggering Effect of Staggered Animated Transitions on Visual Tracking

Abstract

Abstract-Interactive visual applications often rely on animation to transition from one display state to another. There are multiple animation techniques to choose from, and it is not always clear which should produce the best visual correspondences between display elements. One major factor is whether the animation relies on staggering-an incremental delay in start times across the moving elements. It has been suggested that staggering may reduce occlusion, while also reducing display complexity and producing less overwhelming animations, though no empirical evidence has demonstrated these advantages. Work in perceptual psychology does show that reducing occlusion, and reducing inter-object proximity (crowding) more generally, improves performance in multiple object tracking. We ran simulations confirming that staggering can in some cases reduce crowding in animated transitions involving dot clouds (as found in, e.g., animated 2D scatterplots). We empirically evaluated the effect of two staggering techniques on tracking tasks, focusing on cases that should most favour staggering. We found that introducing staggering has a negligible, or even negative, impact on multiple object tracking performance. The potential benefits of staggering may be outweighed by strong costs: a loss of common-motion grouping information about which objects travel in similar paths, and less predictability about when any specific object would begin to move. Staggering may be beneficial in some conditions, but they have yet to be demonstrated. The present results are a significant step toward a better understanding of animation pacing, and provide direction for further research.

Fair Statistical Communication in HCI

“…10 Left: the effects of three animation complexity metrics (one per row) on visual tracking accuracy. The first plot shows mean subject accuracy depending on whether animations are low or high on that metric, while the second plot shows mean within-subject improvement when switching from high to low (after Chevalier et al (2014)). Right: the upper plot shows map reading accuracy for three terrain visualization techniques.…”

Can animation support the visualisation of dynamic graphs?

“…Therefore, the results here may not be further impacted by these techniques. However, a recent experiment has found that staged transitions for certain tasks do not bring large benefits and can sometimes worsen performance [19]. On a philosophical note, it is important to understand what is going on at a basic level, without extra factors potentially inducing confounds into the experiment, to progress these scientific questions forward.…”

Formalizing Emphasis in Information Visualization

“…As a more advanced example of competition between extrinsic and intrinsic emphasis effects, we explain the results of Chevalier et al's study [CDF14]. This study compares the effects of staggered and non-staggered animations on a tracking task during the re-arrangement of dots on a 2D plane.…”

“…The first example uses a simple scatterplot visualization and shows how the intrinsic emphasis effect constrains the available choices for creating efficient extrinsic emphasis effects. The second example uses a more complex study [CDF14] and shows how considering intrinsic and extrinsic emphasis effects can explain study results.…”