A Comparison of Radial and Linear Charts for Visualizing Daily Patterns

Abstract

Radial charts are generally considered less effective than linear charts. Perhaps the only exception is in visualizing periodical time-dependent data, which is believed to be naturally supported by the radial layout. It has been demonstrated that the drawbacks of radial charts outweigh the benefits of this natural mapping. Visualization of daily patterns, as a special case, has not been systematically evaluated using radial charts. In contrast to yearly or weekly recurrent trends, the analysis of daily patterns on a radial chart may benefit from our trained skill on reading radial clocks that are ubiquitous in our culture. In a crowd-sourced experiment with 92 non-expert users, we evaluated the accuracy, efficiency, and subjective ratings of radial and linear charts for visualizing daily traffic accident patterns. We systematically compared juxtaposed 12-hours variants and single 24-hours variants for both layouts in four low-level tasks and one high-level interpretation task. Our results show that over all tasks, the most elementary 24-hours linear bar chart is most accurate and efficient and is also preferred by the users. This provides strong evidence for the use of linear layoutseven for visualizing periodical daily patterns.

Visual Identification of Problematic Bias in Large Label Spaces

“…To guide the user's attention within this visualization, annotations are automatically sorted by their bias value when selecting a metric filter, whereas sorting can be changed by the user. This way, users can vertically scan the annotations visualization to compare different annotations with respect to a sensitive attribute direction, as the bars align vertically for each sensitive attribute direction [41,54] while preserving the common vertical scrolling direction for the list of attributes. We additionally use color-coded bars for visualizing the correlation values, following Mackinlay's ranking [42], where color ranks just behind position for nominal data.…”

“…3 C ). Our bar chart-like visualization is designed to support this task, as users can simply vertically scan different configurations [20,54] per annotation. Directly comparing different metrics for sensitive attribute directions in our annotations visualization can be harder than comparing annotations or configurations, as bars for these metrics are not vertically stacked.…”

Evaluation of 1D Selection Techniques for Mobile Visualizations

“…This helps us comprehend visual choices, but little is known about their consequences: which shape easiest to interact with? Some recent works compare timeline designs in terms of understandability or effectiveness [3,11,18,35,38], and some investigate the effect of tooltips on interaction on desktop [2], yet performance in most of the design space is still unknown, especially on mobile.…”

Evaluating the Effect of Timeline Shape on Visualization Task Performance

“…Brehmer et al [7] compared linear vs. circular layout timelines on mobile devices on their efficacy for showing ranges. Recently, Waldner et al [35] published a study on timeline shape focused on comparing juxtaposed radial charts vs. horizontal linear bar charts and two juxtaposed 12-hr charts vs. a single 24-hr chart. Their design intrinsically measured the combination of shape and juxtaposition technique.…”