Tiffany Andry
UCLouvain, Mons, Belgium
Infographics range from minimalism that aims to convey the raw data to elaborately decorated, or embellished, graphics that aim to engage readers by telling a story. Studies have shown evidence to negative, but also positive, effects on embellishments. We conducted a set of experiments to gauge more precisely how embellishments affect how people relate to infographics and make sense of the conveyed story. We analyzed questionnaires, interviews, and eye-tracking data simplified by bundling to find how embellishments affect reading infographics, beyond engagement, memorization, and recall. We found that, within bounds, embellishments have a positive effect on how users get engaged in understanding an infographic, with very limited downside. To our knowledge, our work is the first that fuses the aforementioned three information sources gathered from the same data-and-user corpus to understand infographics. Our findings can help to design more fine-grained studies to quantify embellishment effects and also to design infographics that effectively use embellishments.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445739
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)