Quantifying Emotional Responses to Immutable Data Characteristics and Designer Choices in Data Visualizations
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
|September 10, 2024
Summary
Visualization design significantly impacts viewer emotion, influencing trust and comprehension. Design elements and even data characteristics affect emotional responses, guiding how to leverage these for better engagement.
Area of Science:
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Information Visualization
- Psychology
Background:
- Emotion plays a critical role in how users interact with and perceive data visualizations.
- Understanding the emotional impact of visualization design is crucial for effective data communication.
- Previous research has not fully quantified the influence of specific design and data elements on user emotion.
Purpose of the Study:
- To quantify the effects of various visualization design elements on user emotion.
- To investigate how data characteristics, independent of meaning, influence viewer emotion.
- To provide guidelines for leveraging emotional responses in visualization design.
Main Methods:
- Conducted five crowdsourced experiments.
- Manipulated design elements: color, chart type.
- Manipulated data characteristics: trend, variability, density.
- Measured emotion using self-reported arousal and valence.
Main Results:
- Multiple design elements significantly influence the emotion induced by visualizations.
- Data characteristics, even without inherent meaning, demonstrably affect viewer emotion.
- Specific design choices can be used to modulate emotional responses.
Conclusions:
- Visualization design is a powerful tool for evoking specific emotional states.
- Data presentation itself carries emotional weight, irrespective of data semantics.
- Guidelines are proposed for using color, scale, and chart type to manage emotional impact.
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