Towards Understanding How Readers Integrate Charts and Captions: A Case Study with Line Charts

TL;DR

This study investigates how readers interpret line charts with captions, revealing that prominence and context influence takeaway emphasis, and offers guidelines for effective chart-caption design.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into how prominence and context affect reader takeaway, informing better chart-caption pairing strategies.

Findings

Readers focus on high-prominence features when both chart and caption emphasize them.

Captions highlighting low-prominence features lead readers to prioritize chart data.

External context enhances understanding and message conveyance.

Abstract

Charts often contain visually prominent features that draw attention to aspects of the data and include text captions that emphasize aspects of the data. Through a crowdsourced study, we explore how readers gather takeaways when considering charts and captions together. We first ask participants to mark visually prominent regions in a set of line charts. We then generate text captions based on the prominent features and ask participants to report their takeaways after observing chart-caption pairs. We find that when both the chart and caption describe a high-prominence feature, readers treat the doubly emphasized high-prominence feature as the takeaway; when the caption describes a low-prominence chart feature, readers rely on the chart and report a higher-prominence feature as the takeaway. We also find that external information that provides context, helps further convey the caption's message to the reader. We use these findings to provide guidelines for authoring effective chart-caption pairs.