Crowdsourcing graphical perception: using mechanical turk to assess visualization design
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Measuring effectiveness of graph visualizations: a cognitive load perspective
Information Visualization
Information Visualization
Implied dynamics in information visualization
Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
ACM SIGGRAPH 2011 Posters
Do Mechanical Turks dream of square pie charts?
Proceedings of the 3rd BELIV'10 Workshop: BEyond time and errors: novel evaLuation methods for Information Visualization
Interactive visualization of emerging topics in multiple social media streams
Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces
Preconceptions and individual differences in understanding visual metaphors
EuroVis'09 Proceedings of the 11th Eurographics / IEEE - VGTC conference on Visualization
Interfacing real-time ozone information
Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on MapInteraction
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The nature of an information visualization can be considered to lie in the visual metaphors it uses to structure information. The process of understanding a visualization therefore involves an interaction between these external visual metaphors and the user's internal knowledge representations. To investigate this claim, we conducted an experiment to test the effects of visual metaphor and verbal metaphor on the understanding of tree visualizations. Participants answered simple data comprehension questions while viewing either a treemap or a node-link diagram. Questions were worded to reflect a verbal metaphor that was either compatible or incompatible with the visualization a participant was using. The results suggest that the visual metaphor indeed affects how a user derives information from a visualization. Additionally, we found that the degree to which a user is affected by the metaphor is strongly correlated with the user's ability to answer task questions correctly. These findings are a first step towards illuminating how visual metaphors shape user understanding, and have significant implications for the evaluation, application, and theory of visualization.