What Does the Chart Say? Grouping Cues Guide Viewer Comparisons and Conclusions in Bar Charts
Cindy Xiong Bearfield, Chase Stokes, Andrew Lovett, Steven Franconeri

TL;DR
This paper investigates how visual grouping cues like proximity and color influence the sequence of comparisons viewers make when interpreting bar charts, revealing that grouping affects comparison order and that second-order comparisons are uncommon.
Contribution
It introduces a taxonomy of visual comparison steps and demonstrates how grouping cues guide the sequence of viewer comparisons in bar charts.
Findings
People compare groups before individual bars.
Second-order comparisons are rare.
Spatial proximity is a stronger grouping cue than color.
Abstract
Reading a visualization is like reading a paragraph. Each sentence is a comparison: the mean of these is higher than those; this difference is smaller than that. What determines which comparisons are made first? The viewer's goals and expertise matter, but the way that values are visually grouped together within the chart also impacts those comparisons. Research from psychology suggests that comparisons involve multiple steps. First, the viewer divides the visualization into a set of units. This might include a single bar or a grouped set of bars. Then the viewer selects and compares two of these units, perhaps noting that one pair of bars is longer than another. Viewers might take an additional third step and perform a second-order comparison, perhaps determining that the difference between one pair of bars is greater than the difference between another pair. We create a visual…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
