andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1811 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Ricardo Pietrobon writes, regarding my post from last year on attitudes toward data graphics, Wouldn’t it be the case to start formally studying the usability of graphics from a cognitive perspective? with platforms such as the mechanical turk it should be fairly straightforward to test alternative methods and come to some conclusions about what might be more informative and what might better assist in supporting decisions. btw, my guess is that these two constructs might not necessarily agree with each other. And Jessica Hullman provides some background: Measuring success for the different goals that you hint at in your article is indeed challenging, and I don’t think that most visualization researchers would claim to have met this challenge (myself included). Visualization researchers may know the user psychology well when it comes to certain dimensions of a graph’s effectiveness (such as quick and accurate responses), but I wouldn’t agree with this statement as a gene
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1 And Jessica Hullman provides some background: Measuring success for the different goals that you hint at in your article is indeed challenging, and I don’t think that most visualization researchers would claim to have met this challenge (myself included). [sent-4, score-0.455]
2 Visualization researchers may know the user psychology well when it comes to certain dimensions of a graph’s effectiveness (such as quick and accurate responses), but I wouldn’t agree with this statement as a general claim. [sent-5, score-0.461]
3 This isn’t to say there isn’t an interest in reaching more holistic evaluations for a visualization success. [sent-6, score-0.327]
4 Some possible outcomes that come to mind for demonstrating alternative affordances of visualizations (which could together fall under the term ‘engagement’) are memorability, metaphor, affect, preference, and likelihood to share. [sent-9, score-0.353]
5 The results make clearer that there trade-offs between what sticks in a viewer’s mind (because it’s attractive, because the metaphor is well-matched to content, etc) and what is best for visual search and accurate perception. [sent-13, score-0.356]
6 A few additional studies look specifically at the importance of the visual metaphor used (e. [sent-15, score-0.327]
7 But there’s plenty of additional work to do in identifying other reasons why embellished or otherwise non-traditional visualizations can be effective in certain cases. [sent-18, score-0.348]
8 For instance, while the tendency for visualizations to enable immediate perceptually-based intuitions tends to be a key affordance, there may be cases where designing a graph to intentionally go against a user’s tendency to form a quick intuitive interpretation of a visualization can be helpful. [sent-19, score-1.077]
9 Some of the visualizations created by Fox news around election data, for example, contain skewed axes and other flaws to mislead a viewer into drawing a conclusion. [sent-20, score-0.38]
10 Eye-tracking can be used to verify what parts of a visualization captured a user’s attention most (through timing and duration of focus on certain areas). [sent-22, score-0.566]
11 But it may also lead to a better understanding of the roles of visual comparisons in interpreting visualized data. [sent-23, score-0.365]
12 Still, while there may be mentions of a need for better understanding internal representations in InfoVis (see also this call from Liu and Stasko http://www. [sent-29, score-0.389]
13 pdf), the empirical work has been done primarily by psychologists who aren’t necessarily publishing in the information visualization venues. [sent-32, score-0.327]
14 Another part of the challenge of measuring engagement may be that it is often represented naturally online through social media activity that isn’t easy to study in a controlled way. [sent-33, score-0.447]
15 Shares of a visualization via facebook or twitter are one form of evidence that it’s engaging, but it’s hard to measure the engagement of two graphs in social media contexts since there are so many aspects of a network that are also crucial, like the connectedness of the sharer, etc. [sent-34, score-0.54]
16 Her idea is that visualization evaluation could learn a lot by studying physical responses or affect through GSR and other physical signals. [sent-37, score-0.717]
17 But GSR and physical signals could help verify when a visualization is found immediately engaging or exciting, or over longer periods where users become particularly frustrated with a visualization. [sent-40, score-0.59]
18 A symptom of this ongoing discussion and exploration of engagement metrics may be that researchers can try out principles in systems that would have once been considered irrelevant. [sent-41, score-0.48]
19 A system that caught my eye at the infovis conference this year deals with intentionally sketchy rendering of visualizations (http://tobias. [sent-42, score-0.495]
20 It was generally well received, and so provides one example of how infovis folks are thinking outside of the box about what makes a graph useful. [sent-45, score-0.326]
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