Exploring the Effect of Word-Scale Visualizations on Reading Behavior

Pascal Goffin (1) , Wesley Willett (2, 1) , Anastasia Bezerianos (3, 4) , Petra Isenberg (1)

1 AVIZ - Analysis and Visualization
2 University of Calgary
3 ILDA - Interacting with Large Data
4 LRI - Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique

We studied how the integration of small visualizations (word- scale visualizations) into a sentence affects reading speed and memorization during a brief reading task. In particular, we were interested in how different placement types—with their inherent text appearance and layout changes—affect readers. We designed a quantitative study in which we gave sentences with or without visualizations for participants to read. Then, we invited them to answer questions on the sentences. We found that the information encoded in the visualizations is more prominent and easily remembered than information in the written text, but that different placement options had little to no effect on reading performance, even if participants had different preferences.

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Pascal Goffin, Wesley Willett, Anastasia Bezerianos, Petra Isenberg. Exploring the Effect of Word-Scale Visualizations on Reading Behavior. Extended Abstracts of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2015, New York, NY, United States. ACM, ⟨10.1145/2702613.2732778⟩. ⟨hal-01127995⟩