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Evaluating the Effect of Timeline Shape on Visualization Task Performance

Published: 23 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Timelines are commonly represented on a horizontal line, which is not necessarily the most effective way to visualize temporal event sequences. However, few experiments have evaluated how timeline shape influences task performance. We present the design and results of a controlled experiment run on Amazon Mechanical Turk (n=192) in which we evaluate how timeline shape affects task completion time, correctness, and user preference. We tested 12 combinations of 4 shapes --- horizontal line, vertical line, circle, and spiral — and 3 data types — recurrent, non-recurrent, and mixed event sequences. We found good evidence that timeline shape meaningfully affects user task completion time but not correctness and that users have a strong shape preference. Building on our results, we present design guidelines for creating effective timeline visualizations based on user task and data types. A free copy of this paper, the evaluation stimuli and data, and code are available https://osf.io/qr5yu/

Supplementary Material

ZIP File (paper110aux.zip)
There are several subfolders: - Analysis: contains the analysis code. data_analysis.ipynb is the ipython notebook that we used for the analysis. - Mechanical_Turk_Experiment_Code: contains the code that we used to run the experiment on mechanical turk. Requires a Firebase SDK key to be run. Instructions are in a README file inside the folder.
MP4 File (paper110vf.mp4)
Supplemental video
MP4 File (paper110pv.mp4)
Preview video
MP4 File (a110-di-bartolomeo.mp4)

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2020
10688 pages
ISBN:9781450367080
DOI:10.1145/3313831
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 the author(s) 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].

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Publication History

Published: 23 April 2020

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Author Tags

  1. controlled experiments
  2. information visualization
  3. temporal event sequences
  4. timelines

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Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)Functional Design Requirements to Facilitate Menstrual Health Data ExplorationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642282(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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  • (2024)Fostering Collaboration in Science: Designing an Exploratory Time Travel VisualizationArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation10.1007/978-3-031-55312-7_4(46-62)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2024
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