Goffin, P., Willett, W., Bezerianos, A., & Isenberg, P. (2015, April). Exploring the Effect of Word-Scale Visualizations on Reading Behavior. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1827-1832).

Goffin, P.; Willett, W.; Bezerianos, A.; Isenberg, P.

2015

Goffin, P., Willett, W., Bezerianos, A., & Isenberg, P. (2015, April). Exploring the Effect of Word-Scale Visualizations on Reading Behavior. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1827-1832).

We studied how the integration of small visualizations (wordscale visualizations) into a sentence affects reading speed and memorization during a brief reading task. In particular, we were interested in how different placement types—with their inherent text appearance and layout changes—affect readers. We designed a quantitative study in which we gave sentences with or without visualizations for participants to read. Then, we invited them to answer questions on the sentences. We found that the information encoded in the visualizations is more prominent and easily remembered than information in the written text, but that different placement options had little to no effect on reading performance, even if participants had different preferences.

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