Understanding the effectiveness of adaptive guidance for narrative visualization

Abstract

We study the effectiveness of adaptive guidance at helping users process textual documents with embedded visualizations, known as narrative visualizations. We do so by leveraging eye tracking to analyze in depth the effect that adaptations meant to guide the user's gaze to relevant parts of the visualizations has on users with different levels of visualization literacy. Results indicate that the adaptations succeed in guiding attention to salient components of the narrative visualizations, especially by generating more transitions between key components of the visualization (i.e., datapoints, labels and legend). We also show that the adaptation helps users with lower levels of visualization literacy to better map datapoints to the legend, which leads in part to improved comprehension of the visualization. These findings shed light on how adaptive guidance helps users with different levels of visualization literacy, informing the design of personalized narrative visualizations.