More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

research-article

ISOTYPE Visualization: Working Memory, Performance, and Engagement with Pictographs

Authors:

Steven L. FranconeriAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 1191 - 1200

https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702275

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Although the infographic and design communities have used simple pictographic representations for decades, it is still unclear whether they can make visualizations more effective. Using simple charts, we tested how pictographic representations impact (1) memory for information just viewed, as well as under the load of additional information, (2) speed of finding information, and (3) engagement and preference in seeking out these visualizations. We find that superfluous images can distract. But we find no user costs -- and some intriguing benefits -- when pictographs are used to represent the data.

References

[1]

Annink, E. and Bruinsma, M., eds. gerd arntz: graphic designer. 010 publishers, 2013.

[2]

Bateman, S., Mandryk, R., Gutwin, C., Genest, A., McDine, D., and Brooks, C. Useful Junk? The Effects of Visual Embellishment on Comprehension and Memorability of Charts. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (2010), 2573--2582.

Digital Library

[3]

Borgo, R., Abdul-Rahman, A., Mohamed, F., Grant, P.W., Reppa, I., and Floridi, L. An Empirical Study on Using Visual Embellishments in Visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 18, 12 (2012), 2759--2768.

Digital Library

[4]

Borkin, M.A., Vo, A.A., Bylinskii, Z., et al. What Makes a Visualization Memorable? Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 6 (2013).

Digital Library

[5]

Brady, T.F., Konkle, T., and Alvarez, G.A. A review of visual memory capacity: Beyond individual items and toward structured representations. Journal of vision 11, 5 (2011).

[6]

Brinton, W.C. Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts. The Engineering Magazine Company, New York, 1914.

[7]

Chevalier, F., Vuillemot, R., and Gali, G. Using concrete scales: a practical framework for effective visual depiction of complex measures. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 19, 12 (2013), 2426--35.

Digital Library

[8]

Choo, H. and Franconeri, S.L. Enumeration of small collections violates Weber's law. Psychonomic bulletin & review 21, 1 (2014), 93--9.

[9]

Cowan, N. The magical number 4 in short-term memory: a reconsideration of mental storage capacity. The Behavioral and brain sciences 24, (2001), 87--114; discussion 114--185.

[10]

Dickinson, C.A. and Intraub, H. Spatial Asymmetries in Viewing and Remembering Scenes: Consequences of an Attentional Bias' Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 71, 6 (2009), 1251--1262.

[11]

Droit-Volet, S., Clément, A., and Fayol, M. Time, number and length: similarities and differences in discrimination in adults and children. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology 61, 12 (2008), 1827--46.

[12]

Franconeri, S.L. The nature and status of visual resources. In Oxford handbook of cognitive psychology. 2013.

[13]

Godden, D.R. and Baddeley, a D. Context-dependent memory in two natural environments: On land and underwater. British Journal of Psychology 66, (1975).

[14]

Halberda, J., Sires, S.F., and Feigenson, L. Multiple spatially overlapping sets can be enumerated in parallel. Psychological science 17, 7 (2006), 572--6.

[15]

Haroz, S. and Whitney, D. How Capacity Limits of Attention Influence Information Visualization Effectiveness. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 18, 12 (2012), 2402--2410.

Digital Library

[16]

Heer, J. and Bostock, M. Crowdsourcing graphical perception. Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '10, ACM Press (2010), 203--212.

Digital Library

[17]

Holmes, N. Pictograms: A view from the drawing board or, what I have learned from Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz (and jazz). Information design journal 10, 2 (2001), 133--144.

[18]

Kaufman, E.L. and Lord, M.W. The discrimination of visual number. The American journal of psychology 62, 4 (1949), 498--525.

[19]

Lin, S., Fortuna, J., Kulkarni, C., Stone, M.C., and Heer, J. Selecting Semantically-Resonant Colors for Data Visualization. EuroVis, (2013), 1--10.

Digital Library

[20]

Michal, A.L. and Franconeri, S.L. The order of attentional shifts determines what visual relations we extract. Journal of Vision 14, 10 (2014), 1033--1033.

[21]

Neurath, O. From hieroglyphs to Isotype: a visual autobiography. Hyphen Press, 2010.

[22]

Setlur, V. and Mackinlay, J.D. Automatic generation of semantic icon encodings for visualizations. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (2014).

Digital Library

[23]

Standing, L. Learning 10,000 pictures. The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology 25, 2 (1973).

[24]

Tufte, E.R. The visual display of quantitative information. Graphics press, 1983.

Digital Library

Cited By

Lan XLiu Y(2025)“I Came Across a Junk”: Understanding Design Flaws of Data Visualization from the Public's PerspectiveIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2024.345634131:1(393-403)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456341
Składanek M(2024)Interaktywny dokument i wizualizacja danych w dwóch ujęciachPrzegląd Kulturoznawczy10.4467/20843860PK.24.017.20328(271-284)Online publication date: Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.24.017.20328
Escribano Roca RGuerrero Oñate P(2024)El movimiento de rearme naval en tiempos de la Unión Liberal. Opinión Pública, cultura estratégica y navalismo (1858-1863)Hispania10.3989/hispania.2024.00584:276(e005)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.3989/hispania.2024.005
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

ISOTYPE Visualization: Working Memory, Performance, and Engagement with Pictographs
1. Human-centered computing

Recommendations

A Model and Framework for Visualization Exploration

Visualization exploration is the process of extracting insight from data via interaction with visual depictions of that data. Visualization exploration is more than presentation; the interaction with both the data and its depiction is as important as ...
Participatory Visualization with Wordle

We discuss the design and usage of “Wordle,” a web-based tool for visualizing text. Wordle creates tag-cloud-like displays that give careful attention to typography, color, and composition. We describe the algorithms used to balance various aesthetic ...
Breakdown visualization: multiple foci polyarchies of values and attributes
CHI EA '02: CHI '02 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Breakdown analysis involves decomposing data into sub-groups to allow for comparison and identification of problem areas. Good analysis requires the ability to group data based on attributes or values. Breakdown Visualization provides a mechanism to ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2015

4290 pages

ISBN:9781450331456

DOI:10.1145/2702123

General Chairs:
Bo Begole
Huawei, USA
,
Jinwoo Kim
Yonsei University, Korea
,
Program Chairs:
Kori Inkpen
Microsoft Research, USA
,
Woontack Woo
KAIST, Korea

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 April 2015

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

National Science Foundation

Conference

CHI '15

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 18 - 23, 2015

Seoul, Republic of Korea

Acceptance Rates

CHI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 486 of 2,120 submissions, 23%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

CHI 2025

Sponsor:
sigchi

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 26 - May 1, 2025

Yokohama , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

112
Total Citations
View Citations
1,410
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)182
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)24

Reflects downloads up to 13 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Lan XLiu Y(2025)“I Came Across a Junk”: Understanding Design Flaws of Data Visualization from the Public's PerspectiveIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2024.345634131:1(393-403)Online publication date: Jan-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456341
Składanek M(2024)Interaktywny dokument i wizualizacja danych w dwóch ujęciachPrzegląd Kulturoznawczy10.4467/20843860PK.24.017.20328(271-284)Online publication date: Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.4467/20843860PK.24.017.20328
Escribano Roca RGuerrero Oñate P(2024)El movimiento de rearme naval en tiempos de la Unión Liberal. Opinión Pública, cultura estratégica y navalismo (1858-1863)Hispania10.3989/hispania.2024.00584:276(e005)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.3989/hispania.2024.005
Arcia AStonbraker SMangal SLor M(2024)A Practical Guide to Participatory Design Sessions for the Development of Information Visualizations: TutorialJournal of Participatory Medicine10.2196/6450816(e64508-e64508)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.2196/64508
Errey NLiang CLeong TChen YVally HBennett C(2024)Nudging with Narrative Visualization: Communicating to a Young Adult Audience in the PandemicProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869508:CSCW2(1-21)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686950
You CChen HChen PLai WYuan CBi N(2024)Toward Understanding the Impact of Visualized Focus Levels in Virtual Reality on User Presence and ExperienceProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765278:MHCI(1-30)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676527
Wu KQuadri GWang AOsei-Tutu DPetersen EKoushik VSzafir D(2024)Our Stories, Our Data: Co-designing Visualizations with People with Intellectual and Developmental DisabilitiesProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675615(1-17)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663548.3675615
Tran TLee HPark J(2024)Discovering Accessible Data Visualizations for People with ADHDProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642112(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642112
Arunkumar APadilla LBryan C(2024)Mind Drifts, Data Shifts: Utilizing Mind Wandering to Track the Evolution of User Experience with Data VisualizationsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2024.345634431:1(1169-1179)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456344
Hurter CRogowitz BTruong GAndry TRomat HGardy LAmini FRiche N(2024)Memory Recall for Data Visualizations in Mixed Reality, Virtual Reality, 3D and 2DIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2023.333658830:10(6691-6706)Online publication date: Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2023.3336588
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents