An Age-based Study into Interactive Narrative Visualization Engagement

TL;DR

This study investigates how audience age influences engagement with interactive narrative visualizations, revealing that younger audiences understand and engage more deeply, leading to inclusive design recommendations.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on age-related engagement differences and offers practical guidelines for designing inclusive interactive visualizations.

Findings

Older audiences show slightly lower engagement scores.

Younger audiences better understand interactive narrative patterns.

Design recommendations for inclusive visualization tailored to age groups.

Abstract

Research has shown that an audiences' age impacts their engagement in digital media. Interactive narrative visualization is an increasingly popular form of digital media that combines data visualization and storytelling to convey important information. However, audience age is often overlooked by interactive narrative visualization authors. Using an established visualization engagement questionnaire, we ran an empirical experiment where we compared end-user engagement to audience age. We found a small difference in engagement scores where older age cohorts were less engaged than the youngest age cohort. Our qualitative analysis revealed that the terminology and overall understanding of interactive narrative patterns integrated into narrative visualization was more apparent in the feedback from younger age cohorts relative to the older age cohorts. We conclude this paper with a series of recommendations for authors of interactive narrative visualization on how to design inclusively for audiences according to their age.