Hi, my name is Rosa and I'll be presenting the work which I did together with Eva Hornecker:
It's just a graph - The effect of post-hoc rationalisation on InfoVis Evaluation
So as a short background, InfoVis concerns itself with visually representing abstract
data and it increasingly plays role in our everyday lives.
Despite this and the large variety of purposes for which InfoVis is used, the role of emotions
remains under explored, with most InfoVis research focussing on the usability.
Nowadays, there is a growing body of work that explores the user experience. However, only recently,
we see examples of studies that explore the effect of emotional engagement in InfoVis,
with for example Hogan et al. showing that people emotionally connect to even very simple
and classic charts. The contribution of our study is therefore an understanding
for why emotions have received so little attention in InfoVis and why certain methods seem to
work better at uncovering their role.
For our research, we conducted a study with 24 participants. The study consisted of two
parts, with the first part being an online survey. Here participants had to review 2 traditional
data visualisations: one bar chart about the share of non-nationals in European countries, as you can see on the top,
and a line chart about the livebirths in the Netherlands, as you can see on the bottom.
So first, participants got to see one of these visualisations, after which they had to fill out
the AttrakDiff, UEQ, and PANAS. This process was then repeated for the second visualisation.
Having completed this, participants moved on the second part, which was
the semi-structured interview. This data we analysed using thematic analysis.
In this presentation we'll focus on the qualitative results, the others can be found in our paper.
Our thematic analysis resulted in 6 themes and 4 subthemes, as shown in this visualisation.
For clarity and time purposes, we've grouped these themes in three clusters, which we will discuss now:
So our first cluster is usability and aesthetics.
Despite using questionnaires that assessed the hedonic qualities and emotional
aspects, participants thought our study would be about the aesthetics and the easiness of the graphs.
Participants mentioned that these elements influence what you think of a visualisation
and whether you actually want to look at it. Moreover, graphs should be easy. If this isn't the case
or if the aesthetics don't align with the participant's standards, it results in annoyance towards the visualisation.
The second clusters concerns sensemaking.
In order to make sense of the visualisations, participants either looked for the message
of the graph and what it was telling them, or they looked for personal information, such as their home country.
This was needed according to them to relate to the visualisation.
This brings us to our last cluster, which focusses on the absence of connection.
So as just mentioned, participants stated that without personal information, they couldn't
establish a connection to the visualisations. This resulted in a visualisation being
seen as just a graph , something that isn't meant to be interesting, but that should
just get it's point across. This feeling was shared by most of our participants, with 18
mentioning that they did not connect to the visualisations. Participants stated that
emotions have to be separated from it, in order to analyse the objective data.
Furthermore, it was implied that you aren't allowed to connect or feel anything.
These findings are a stark contrast to previous work, which used the micro-phenomenological
interview technique. Here the authors found that people do connect to these simple visualisations,
on an emotional and personal level.
We argue that the differences in findings are a result of post-hoc rationalisation.
In our case a process where people initially do feel something and have a connection to
the visualisations, but they either consciously remove it, subconsciously forget and repress it,
or they possibly think it isn't interesting to the researchers. This would all explain why emotions have yet received
so little attention in InfoVis, as they are simply being obscured.
For future work, we argue that it is important to deepen our understanding of the micro-phenomenological
interview technique. Moreover, it isn't easy to use. So therefore, we should also explore
other techniques, which provide similar deep insights. Lastly, we think it is important
to keep exploring visualisation alternatives, such as physicalisations, and explore
whether these do allows us to connect to data.
Thanks for listening, we hope you enjoyed it and please have a look at our paper for far more details.