Bateman, S., Mandryk, R. L., Gutwin, C., Genest, A., McDine, D., & Brooks, C. (2010). Useful junk? The effects of visual embellishment on comprehension and memorability of charts. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2573-2582).

Bateman, S.; Mandryk, R.; Gutwin, C.; Genest, A.; McDine, D.; Brooks, C.

2010

Bateman, S., Mandryk, R. L., Gutwin, C., Genest, A., McDine, D., & Brooks, C. (2010). Useful junk? The effects of visual embellishment on comprehension and memorability of charts. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2573-2582).

Guidelines for designing information charts often state that the presentation should reduce ‘chart junk’ – visual embellishments that are not essential to understanding the data. In contrast, some popular chart designers wrap the presented data in detailed and elaborate imagery, raising the questions of whether this imagery is really as detrimental to understanding as has been proposed, and whether the visual embellishment may have other benefits. To investigate these issues, we conducted an experiment that compared embellished charts with plain ones, and measured both interpretation accuracy and long-term recall. We found that people’s accuracy in describing the embellished charts was no worse than for plain charts, and that their recall after a two-to-three-week gap was significantly better. Although we are cautious about recommending that all charts be produced in this style, our results question some of the premises of the minimalist approach to chart design.

Our study showed that if memorability is important, visual imagery can help to fix a chart in a viewer’s memory. However, we do not advocate this strategy as a general principle, because the use of strong images in charts is contentious – for example, images convey messages that may intentionally or unintentionally bias the viewer’s interpretation of the data. More importantly, then, our work shows that there can be strong effects from the inclusion of visual embellishments – something that has not been reported before – and that this phenomenon should be better understood by researchers and chart designers.

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