Revisiting Categorical Color Perception in Scatterplots: Sequential, Diverging, and Categorical Palettes

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Tseng, Chin, Wang, Arran Zeyu, Quadri, Ghulam Jilani, Szafir, Danielle Albers
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866910456525881344
author Tseng, Chin
Wang, Arran Zeyu
Quadri, Ghulam Jilani
Szafir, Danielle Albers
author_facet Tseng, Chin
Wang, Arran Zeyu
Quadri, Ghulam Jilani
Szafir, Danielle Albers
contents Existing guidelines for categorical color selection are heuristic, often grounded in intuition rather than empirical studies of readers' abilities. While design conventions recommend palettes maximize hue differences, more recent exploratory findings indicate other factors, such as lightness, may play a role in effective categorical palette design. We conducted a crowdsourced experiment on mean value judgments in multi-class scatterplots using five color palette families--single-hue sequential, multi-hue sequential, perceptually-uniform multi-hue sequential, diverging, and multi-hue categorical--that differ in how they manipulate hue and lightness. Participants estimated relative mean positions in scatterplots containing 2 to 10 categories using 20 colormaps. Our results confirm heuristic guidance that hue-based categorical palettes are most effective. However, they also provide additional evidence that scalable categorical encoding relies on more than hue variance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_03787
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Categorical Color Perception in Scatterplots: Sequential, Diverging, and Categorical Palettes
Tseng, Chin
Wang, Arran Zeyu
Quadri, Ghulam Jilani
Szafir, Danielle Albers
Human-Computer Interaction
Existing guidelines for categorical color selection are heuristic, often grounded in intuition rather than empirical studies of readers' abilities. While design conventions recommend palettes maximize hue differences, more recent exploratory findings indicate other factors, such as lightness, may play a role in effective categorical palette design. We conducted a crowdsourced experiment on mean value judgments in multi-class scatterplots using five color palette families--single-hue sequential, multi-hue sequential, perceptually-uniform multi-hue sequential, diverging, and multi-hue categorical--that differ in how they manipulate hue and lightness. Participants estimated relative mean positions in scatterplots containing 2 to 10 categories using 20 colormaps. Our results confirm heuristic guidance that hue-based categorical palettes are most effective. However, they also provide additional evidence that scalable categorical encoding relies on more than hue variance.
title Revisiting Categorical Color Perception in Scatterplots: Sequential, Diverging, and Categorical Palettes
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03787