What We Augment When We Augment Visualizations: A Design Elicitation Study of How We Visually Express Data Relationships

TL;DR

The paper tackles the gap in understanding how users visually augment data relationships by moving beyond top-down design spaces. It employs a design elicitation study in which participants sketch augmentations on printed charts in response to ten prompts, collecting 364 drawings and deriving eight augmentation categories. The contributions include a user-defined augmentation design space, a publicly available repository of drawings, and insights linking augmentation choices to design guidelines and perceptual considerations. The findings highlight dominant use of encoding channels and threshold lines, with practical implications for tool support, defaults, and strategies to mitigate biases or misinformation, thereby advancing visualization design practice.

Abstract

Visual augmentations are commonly added to charts and graphs in order to convey richer and more nuanced information about relationships in the data. However, many design spaces proposed for categorizing augmentations were defined in a top-down manner, based on expert heuristics or from surveys of published visualizations. Less well understood are user preferences and intuitions when designing augmentations. In this paper, we address the gap by conducting a design elicitation study, where study participants were asked to draw the different ways they would visually express the meaning of ten different prompts. We obtained 364 drawings from the study, and identified the emergent categories of augmentations used by participants. The contributions of this paper are: (i) a user-defined design space of visualization augmentations, (ii) a repository of hand drawn augmentations made by study participants, and (iii) a discussion of insights into participant considerations, and connections between our study and existing design guidelines.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Examples of encoding channels used in the study.
• Figure 2: Segmentation applied to bar charts and line charts.
• Figure 3: From left to right: examples of participants duplicating, adding, and layering marks onto existing visualizations.
• Figure 4: Examples of participants changing the mark used in a visualization. From left to right: changing a point chart to a bar chart, changing a point chart to a line chart, and changing a line chart to an area chart.
• Figure 5: Two instances where participants used glyphs to convey the prompts.