research-article

Minimalism in information visualization: attitudes towards maximizing the data-ink ratio

Authors:

Ohad Inbar,

Noam Tractinsky,

Joachim MeyerAuthors Info & Claims

ECCE '07: Proceedings of the 14th European conference on Cognitive ergonomics: invent! explore!

Pages 185 - 188

https://doi.org/10.1145/1362550.1362587

Published: 28 August 2007 Publication History

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Abstract

Motivation -- To evaluate people's acceptance of the minimalist approach to information visualization.

Research approach -- Eighty seven students, divided into three experimental conditions, rated their preference for two different graphs displaying identical information - a standard bar-graph and a minimalist version. Both versions were taken from Tufte (1983).

Findings/Design -- The results indicate a clear preference of non-minimalist bar-graphs, suggesting low acceptance of minimalist design principles such as high data-ink ratio.

Research limitations/Implications -- Subjects had no prior experience with the minimalist graph and therefore familiarity might have an effect on the results.

Originality/Value -- The research contributes empirical results on people's preferences to the mostly theoretical/ideological debate over approaches to the presentation of quantitative information.

Take away message -- People did not like Tufte's minimalist design of bar-graphs; they seem to prefer "chartjunk" instead.

References

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Information

Published In

ECCE '07: Proceedings of the 14th European conference on Cognitive ergonomics: invent! explore!

August 2007

334 pages

ISBN:9781847998491

DOI:10.1145/1362550

Conference Chairs:
Willem Paul Brinkman
Brunel University, UK/Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
,
Dong Han Ham
Middlesex University, UK
,
B. L. William Wong
Middlesex University, UK

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 August 2007

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ECCE07

Sponsor:

ACM
SIGCHI
EACE

ECCE07: European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics 2007

August 28 - 31, 2007

London, United Kingdom

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Overall Acceptance Rate 56 of 91 submissions, 62%

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