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A Lie Reveals the Truth: Quasimodes for Task-Aligned Data Presentation

Published: 02 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Designers are often discouraged from creating data visualizations that omit or distort information, because they can easily be misleading. However, the same representations that could be used to deceive can provide benefits when chosen to appropriately align with user tasks. We present an interaction technique, Perceptual Glimpses, which allows for the transparent presentation of so-called 'deceptive' views of information that are made temporary using quasimodes. When presented using Perceptual Glimpses, message-level exaggeration caused by a truncated axis on a bar chart was reduced under some conditions, but users require guidance to avoid errors, and view presentation order may affect trust. When Perceptual Glimpses was extended to display a range of views that might otherwise be deceptive or difficult to understand if shown out of context, users were able to understand and leverage these transformations to perform a range of low-level tasks. Design recommendations and examples suggest extensions of the technique.

Supplementary Material

ZIP File (paper193.zip)
This provides the charts and critical evaluation questions used for Phase II of our second experiment. Questions are stored in an .xlsx spreadsheet which can be opened with Microsoft Excel. Images of charts are stored as .png files.
ZIP File (paper193pvc.zip)
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2019
    9077 pages
    ISBN:9781450359702
    DOI:10.1145/3290605
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    Published: 02 May 2019

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    Author Tags

    1. animation
    2. deceptive visualization
    3. perception

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    • (2024)To Cut or Not To Cut? A Systematic Exploration of Y-Axis TruncationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642102(1-12)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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