VisQuiz: Exploring Feedback Mechanisms to Improve Graphical Perception

TL;DR

This study investigates how extended feedback mechanisms, implemented through VisQuiz, can enhance graphical perception skills in visualization tasks, showing improved performance with bubble charts after receiving trial feedback.

Contribution

Introduces VisQuiz, a feedback system for graphical perception studies, demonstrating that detailed feedback improves participant performance in visualization comparison tasks.

Findings

Participants performed significantly better with feedback on bubble charts.

Performance improvements persisted even after feedback was removed.

Overall trend indicates feedback enhances graphical perception skills.

Abstract

Graphical perception studies are a key element of visualization research, forming the basis of design recommendations and contributing to our understanding of how people make sense of visualizations. However, graphical perception studies typically include only brief training sessions, and the impact of longer and more in-depth feedback remains unclear. In this paper, we explore the design and evaluation of feedback for graphical perception tasks, called VisQuiz. Using a quiz-like metaphor, we design feedback for a typical visualization comparison experiment, showing participants their answer alongside the correct answer in an animated sequence in each trial. We extend this quiz metaphor to include summary feedback after each stage of the experiment, providing additional moments for participants to reflect on their performance. To evaluate VisQuiz, we conduct a between-subjects experiment, including three stages of 40 trials each with a control condition that included only summary feedback. Results from n = 80 participants show that once participants started receiving trial feedback (Stage 2) they performed significantly better with bubble charts than those in the control condition. This effect carried over when feedback was removed (Stage 3). Results also suggest an overall trend of improved performance due to feedback. We discuss these findings in the context of other visualization literacy efforts, and possible future work at the intersection of visualization, feedback, and learning. Experiment data and analysis scripts are available at the following repository https://osf.io/jys5d/