The arrangement of marks impacts afforded messages: ordering, partitioning, spacing, and coloring in bar charts

@Article{Fygenson2023ArrangementMarksImpacts,
  author   = {Fygenson, Racquel and Franconeri, Steven and Bertini, Enrico},
  journal  = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
  title    = {The arrangement of marks impacts afforded messages: ordering, partitioning, spacing, and coloring in bar charts},
  year     = {2023},
  note     = {VIS '23. Preprint at \url{https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.32878.48961/1}. Supplemental material at \url{https://osf.io/np3q7}.},
  abstract = {Data visualizations present a massive number of potential messages to an observer. One might notice that one group's average is larger than another's, or that a difference in values is smaller than a difference between two others, or any of a combinatorial explosion of other possibilities. The message that a viewer tends to notice-the message that a visualization 'affords'-is strongly affected by how values are arranged in a chart, e.g., how the values are colored or positioned. Although understanding the mapping between a chart's arrangement and what viewers tend to notice is critical for creating guidelines and recommendation systems, current empirical work is insufficient to lay out clear r ules. We present a set of empirical evaluations of how different messages-including ranking, grouping, and part-to-whole relationships-are afforded by variations in ordering, partitioning, spacing, and coloring of values, within the ubiquitous case study of bar graphs. In doing so, we introduce a quantitative method that is easily scalable, reviewable, and replicable, laying groundwork for further investigation of the effects of arrangement on message affordances across other visualizations and tasks. Pre-registration and all supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/np3q7 and https://osf.io/bvy95, respectively.},
  series   = {VIS/TVCG},
}