Shape It Up: An Empirically Grounded Approach for Designing Shape Palettes

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Tseng, Chin, Wang, Arran Zeyu, Quadri, Ghulam Jilani, Szafir, Danielle Albers
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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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 Shape is commonly used to distinguish between categories in multi-class scatterplots. However, existing guidelines for choosing effective shape palettes rely largely on intuition and do not consider how these needs may change as the number of categories increases. Although shapes can be a finite number compared to colors, they can not be represented by a numerical space, making it difficult to propose a general guideline for shape choices or shed light on the design heuristics of designer-crafted shape palettes. This paper presents a series of four experiments evaluating the efficiency of 39 shapes across three tasks -- relative mean judgment tasks, expert choices, and data correlation estimation. Given how complex and tangled results are, rather than relying on conventional features for modeling, we built a model and introduced a corresponding design tool that offers recommendations for shape encodings. The perceptual effectiveness of shapes significantly varies across specific pairs, and certain shapes may enhance perceptual efficiency and accuracy. However, how performance varies does not map well to classical features of shape such as angles, fill, or convex hull. We developed a model based on pairwise relations between shapes measured in our experiments and the number of shapes required to intelligently recommend shape palettes for a given design. This tool provides designers with agency over shape selection while incorporating empirical elements of perceptual performance captured in our study. Our model advances the understanding of shape perception in visualization contexts and provides practical design guidelines for advanced shape usage in visualization design that optimize perceptual efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_16079
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Shape It Up: An Empirically Grounded Approach for Designing Shape Palettes
Tseng, Chin
Wang, Arran Zeyu
Quadri, Ghulam Jilani
Szafir, Danielle Albers
Human-Computer Interaction
Shape is commonly used to distinguish between categories in multi-class scatterplots. However, existing guidelines for choosing effective shape palettes rely largely on intuition and do not consider how these needs may change as the number of categories increases. Although shapes can be a finite number compared to colors, they can not be represented by a numerical space, making it difficult to propose a general guideline for shape choices or shed light on the design heuristics of designer-crafted shape palettes. This paper presents a series of four experiments evaluating the efficiency of 39 shapes across three tasks -- relative mean judgment tasks, expert choices, and data correlation estimation. Given how complex and tangled results are, rather than relying on conventional features for modeling, we built a model and introduced a corresponding design tool that offers recommendations for shape encodings. The perceptual effectiveness of shapes significantly varies across specific pairs, and certain shapes may enhance perceptual efficiency and accuracy. However, how performance varies does not map well to classical features of shape such as angles, fill, or convex hull. We developed a model based on pairwise relations between shapes measured in our experiments and the number of shapes required to intelligently recommend shape palettes for a given design. This tool provides designers with agency over shape selection while incorporating empirical elements of perceptual performance captured in our study. Our model advances the understanding of shape perception in visualization contexts and provides practical design guidelines for advanced shape usage in visualization design that optimize perceptual efficiency.
title Shape It Up: An Empirically Grounded Approach for Designing Shape Palettes
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16079