Visual Representation: Implications for Decision Making

Abstract

A large number of visualization tools have been created to help decision makers understand increasingly rich databases of product, customer, sales force, and other types of marketing information. This article presents a framework for thinking about how visual representations are likely to affect the decision processes or tasks that marketing managers and consumers commonly face, particularly those that involve the analysis or synthesis of substantial amounts of data. From this framework, the authors derive a set of testable propositions that serve as an agenda for further research. Although visual representations are likely to improve marketing manager efficiency, offer new insights, and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, they may also bias decisions by focusing attention on a limited set of alternatives, increasing the salience and evaluability of less diagnostic information, and encouraging inaccurate comparisons. Given this, marketing managers are advised to subject insights from visual representations to more formal analysis.

User-controllable personalization: A case study with SetFusion

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“…Using the Venn diagram to explain intersections among recommendation approaches, i.e. what items they have in common and which are recommended by only one method, provides different depths of field, a positive characteristic in decision making that "… allows the user to focus on a subset of alternatives but remain cognizant of others" (Lurie & Mason, 2007). The novel Venn diagram feature has been combined with an extended slider-based controls that have been already suggested but remain underexplored.…”

Learning through passive participation in asset market bubbles

“…If agents are boundedly rational or do not process price information fully (Simon 1987), then information that is more easily processed will result in less confusion and a reduction in bubbles. Graphical displays may allow users to 'see' patterns in data (Lurie and Mason 2007). Thus, we conjecture that the Visualized market will result in a reduction in bubble formation relative to the Text market.…”

Interactive Analytics for Complex Cognitive Activities on Information from Annotations of Prokaryotic Genomes

“…We developed interactive analytics using guidelines provided for designing interactive visual representations for complex cognitive activities [10,18]. Therefore to design human-information interaction tools for decision making, the interaction features in the design are expected to include the following action patterns: blending, filtering, linking/unlinking, measuring, sharing and translating [7].…”