Assessing Affective Objectives for Communicative Visualizations

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework for selecting assessments to evaluate affective objectives in communicative visualizations, addressing the challenge of measuring attitudes and emotions.

Contribution

It introduces criteria for choosing assessments aligned with affective objectives and demonstrates their application in a complex visualization design task.

Findings

Framework enables evaluation of affective objectives in visualization design.

Assessment criteria span multiple fields including psychology and health.

Application shows how assessments inform design decisions.

Abstract

Using learning objectives to define designer intents for communicative visualizations can be a powerful design tool. Cognitive and affective objectives are concrete and specific, which can be translated to assessments when creating, evaluating, or comparing visualization ideas. However, while there are many well-validated assessments for cognitive objectives, affective objectives are uniquely challenging. It is easy to see if a visualization helps someone remember the number of patients in a clinic, but harder to observe the change in their attitudes around donations to a crisis. In this work, we define a set of criteria for selecting assessments--from education, advocacy, economics, health, and psychology--that align with affective objectives. We illustrate the use of the framework in a complex affective design task that combines personal narratives and visualizations. Our chosen assessments allow us to evaluate different designs in the context of our objectives and competing psychological theories.