We present the findings of four studies related to the visualization of sleep data on wearables with two form factors: smartwatches and fitness bands. Our goal was to understand the interests, preferences, and effectiveness of different sleep visualizations by form factor. In a survey, we showed that wearers were mostly interested in weekly sleep duration, and nightly sleep phase data. Visualizations of this data were generally preferred over purely text-based representations, and the preferred chart type for fitness bands, and smartwatches was often the same. In one in-person pilot study, and two crowdsourced studies, we then tested the effectiveness of the most preferred representations for different tasks, and found that participants performed simple tasks effectively on both form factors but more complex tasks benefited from the larger smartwatch size. Lastly, we reflect on our crowdsourced study methodology for testing the effectiveness of visualizations for wearables. Supplementary material is available at https://osf.io/yz8ar/.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3501921
Recent work has highlighted that emotion is key to the user experience with data stories. However, limited attention has been paid to negative emotions specifically. This work investigates the outcomes of negative emotions in the context of serious data stories and examines how they can be augmented by design methods from the perspectives of both storytellers and viewers. First, we conducted a workshop with 9 data story experts to understand the possible benefits of eliciting negative emotions in serious data stories and 19 potential design methods that contribute to negative emotions. Based on the findings from the workshop, we then conducted a lab study with 35 participants to explore the outcomes of eliciting negative emotions as well as the effectiveness of the design methods. The results indicated that negative emotions mainly facilitated contemplative experiences and long-term memory. Besides, the design methods showed varied effectiveness in augmenting negative emotions and being recalled.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517530
Chatbots have garnered interest as conversational interfaces for a variety of tasks. While general design guidelines exist for chatbot interfaces, little work explores analytical chatbots that support conversing with data. We explore Gricean Maxims to help inform the basic design of effective conversational interaction. We also draw inspiration from natural language interfaces for data exploration to support ambiguity and intent handling. We ran Wizard of Oz studies with 30 participants to evaluate user expectations for text and voice chatbot design variants. Results identified preferences for intent interpretation and revealed variations in user expectations based on the interface affordances. We subsequently conducted an exploratory analysis of three analytical chatbot systems (text + chart, voice + chart, voice-only) that implement these preferred design variants. Empirical evidence from a second 30-participant study informs implications specific to data-driven conversation such as interpreting intent, data orientation, and establishing trust through appropriate system responses.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3501972
Making time estimates, such as how long a given task might take, frequently leads to inaccurate predictions because of an optimistic bias. Previous attempts to alleviate this bias, including decomposing the task into smaller components and listing potential surprises, have not shown any major improvement. This article builds on the premise that these procedures may have failed because they involve compound probabilities and mixture distributions which are difficult to compute in one's head. We hypothesize that predictive visualizations of such distributions would facilitate the estimation of task durations. We conducted a crowdsourced study in which 145 participants provided different estimates of overall and sub-task durations and we used these to generate predictive visualizations of the resulting mixture distributions. We compared participants' initial estimates with their updated ones and found compelling evidence that predictive visualizations encourage less optimistic estimates.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3502010