Bar Chart Embellishments

Exploring Chart Perception

An Evaluation of the Impactof Visual Embellishments in Bar Charts

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Drew Skau Lane Harrison Robert Kosara@SeeingStructure @laneharrison @eagereyes

Slides: https://goo.gl/BxhHRV

Infographics

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Infographics

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(They get worse.)http://viz.wtf/@WTFViz

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Bar Chart Embellishments

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Bars with caps on the ends

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Bars that overlap their neighbors

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Bars with quadratic area changes

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Bars with rounded ends

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Triangular bars

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Bars that extend below the zero line

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Baseline Chart

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Study Questions

Absolute Judgement:In the chart below, what is the value of A?

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78

Study Questions

Relative Comparison:In the chart below, what percentage is B of A?

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12.5%

Hypotheses

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Embellishment

Overlapping

Quadratic

Capped

Triangle

Extended

Rounded

AbsoluteJudgement

RelativeComparison

Absolute Judgement Results

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Relative Comparison Results

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Results

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Embellishment

Overlapping

Quadratic

Capped

Triangle

Extended

Rounded

AbsoluteJudgement

RelativeComparison

Not Statistically Significant

Statistically Significant

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Why did capped perform equally well and with lower variance for absolute comparisons?

Overshoot in Fonts

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Compromise

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vs.

Disinformation Visualizations

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http://fellinlovewithdata.com/research/deceptive-visualizations

http://visualisingadvocacy.org/blog/disinformation-visualization-how-lie-datavis

Recommendations

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Recommendations

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Definitely:

Recommendations

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Cautiously:

Questions

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Drew Skau Lane Harrison Robert Kosara@SeeingStructure @laneharrison @eagereyes

Paper:http://goo.gl/Hnr3MR

Slides:https://goo.gl/BxhHRV

Code:http://github.com/dwskau/bar-chart-embellishment