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Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction

arXiv:1709.08546 (cs)
[Submitted on 25 Sep 2017 (v1), last revised 24 Apr 2018 (this version, v3)]

Title:Task-Based Effectiveness of Basic Visualizations

Authors:Bahador Saket, Alex Endert, Cagatay Demiralp
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Abstract:Visualizations of tabular data are widely used; understanding their effectiveness in different task and data contexts is fundamental to scaling their impact. However, little is known about how basic tabular data visualizations perform across varying data analysis tasks and data attribute types. In this paper, we report results from a crowdsourced experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of five visualization types --- Table, Line Chart, Bar Chart, Scatterplot, and Pie Chart --- across ten common data analysis tasks and three data attribute types using two real-world datasets. We found the effectiveness of these visualization types significantly varies across task and data attribute types, suggesting that visualization design would benefit from considering context dependent effectiveness. Based on our findings, we derive recommendations on which visualizations to choose based on different tasks. We finally train a decision tree on the data we collected to drive a recommender, showcasing how to effectively engineer experimental user data into practical visualization systems.
Subjects: Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)
Cite as: arXiv:1709.08546 [cs.HC]
  (or arXiv:1709.08546v3 [cs.HC] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1709.08546

Submission history

From: Bahador Saket [view email]
[v1] Mon, 25 Sep 2017 15:17:57 UTC (1,738 KB)
[v2] Thu, 15 Feb 2018 17:14:18 UTC (6,591 KB)
[v3] Tue, 24 Apr 2018 16:34:09 UTC (6,592 KB)
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