Hello everyone, I am happy today to present our paper named
'Interpreting the effect of embellishments on chart visualizations'
In this paper, we are wondering how people
assimilate visual embellishments found in the infographics.
Indeed, at one extreme, minimalist style infographics directly and
unambiguously encode data to maximize the number of
items shown on a given screen space. At the other extreme, infographics like
the one present in mass media use many graphic elements that 'merely'
embellish the display. These visual elements can be shadows,
background textures, icons or complex layouts. The effect of
embellishment is not fully understood: the literature
considers it as chartjunk or as an added value in terms of memorization,
these data tell. I will call this process 'assimilation' in
recall and engagement. Less is known in how people make sense of what the story
this presentation. We consider assimilation along several
dimensions explored in the questions you can read here.
Our goal is to propose a study combining all these elements and also
showing relationships between the different questions.
In the interest of time, i will not go into detail
about the experimental design. Keep in mind that we have conducted an
experiment where 40 digital communication
professionals looked at embellished infographics
and standard counterpart created by minimalist
design rules. We have collected three types of users feedback:
questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and eye-tracking data.
The main objective of the experiments was to compare the assimilation of
minimalist and embellished visualizations.
In the first step of the experiment, we asked to the participants to rate their
strongly disagree to strongly agree, for the statements you
agreement level on the five-point Likert scale from
can see here on the right. From the statistical analysis, we are now
able to say that Almost all embellished visualization
There is a strong correlation between finding a visualization
were preferred and were found more beautiful than the standard ones.
beautiful and liking it. Standard visualizations
are always clearer than the embellished ones and, finally,
interestingness and understanding are not impacted by visual embellishments.
Then, we conducted semi-structured interviews in order to
reach a deeper understanding of quantitative results. Quickly, we can
users feeling of effort and engagement because users felt
say that visual embellishments have a positive impact on
particularly involved in visualization related to their
interests, no matter if it is embellished or not. And the feeling that
a visualization is beautiful creates a pleasant
sensation that reduces the feeling of effort. Moreover, we had the participants
Briefly, I can describe bundling as a visualization method that
gaze data. We used the bundling to interpret them.
aggregates the reading path for all participants and proposes
the most emergent path indicating the beginning and the end of
pattern through color (from dark blue to white)
and direction through vectors. Unfortunately,
We made several observations, including the following:
time does not allow me to expand on technical arrangements.
A visualization is read cyclically. Reading starts and ends with the title,
except when it comes to the footnote where reading stops.
Icons affixed to a traditional chart in an embellished visualization
numbers and text are the main attention- attracting elements
do not strongly affect reading path and, finally,
in reading the visualization. We can now discuss the results
Embellishments increase aesthetics which correlates
with liking but decrease clarity. It also decreases
the negative user effort feeling and increases engagement. Finally, eye gaze
affect reading order. We conclude that, if not excessively used,
analysis by bundling shows that embellishments do not strongly
embellishments have overall more added value than adverse effects.
By the way, to our knowledge, this is the first time that interviews and gaze
data interpreted by bundling were correlated.
is of great added value and we now proposed to qualify it as a practice.
Finally, we assert that the embellishment of data visualization
to encourage our community to include embellishments in data visualization design
As with any practice, embellishments must be mastered. We hope
principle, as well as to include practice in the future technological developments. 73 00:05:09,400 --> 1193:07:56,496 Thank you very much.