Visual Representations of Meta-Information

Abstract

We conducted two studies that investigated display characteristics related to color (hue, saturation, brightness, and transparency) and contrast with a background for displaying information qualifiers (termed meta-information) such as uncertainty, age, and source quality. Level of detail (or granularity) of the meta-information and task demands were also manipulated. Participants were asked to rank and rate colored regions overlaid on different map backgrounds based on the level of meta-information the regions displayed. Results from Study 1 indicated that participants could appropriately rank and rate levels of meta-information across saturation, brightness, and transparency conditions, and results from Study 1 and Study 2 showed that the natural direction of ordering is complex and dependent on the relevance of different information to the task and the contrast of the overlay region with the background.

How to Assess Visual Communication of Uncertainty? A Systematic Review of Geospatial Uncertainty Visualisation User Studies

“…from 0 to 100) (Bisantz et al, 2009;Boukhelifa et al, 2012;Finger and Bisantz, 2002) or on a Likert scale (Drecki, 2002). The difference from value retrieval is that no legend is provided or needed.…”

“…Additionally, there are ranking tasks that let subjects assign an order to a number of entities by their data value (Bisantz et al, 1999;Finger and Bisantz, 2002) or their uncertainty (Bisantz et al, 1999;Bisantz et al, 2009;Blenkinsop et al, 2000;Boukhelifa et al, 2012). Ranking tasks by combined data value and uncertainty require interpretation and are thus not included since we focus on the communication aspects here.…”

“…The study by Bisantz et al (2009), unlike the studies before, did not use resolution to represent uncertainty, but colour saturation, value and transparency. The authors compared two different backgrounds the symbols were placed on: a uniform grey area and a map.…”

“…Lighter values signifying uncertainty result in a 'fading out' effect, whereas darker colours make regions with high uncertainty more prominent. Bisantz et al (2009) measured a tendency to assign lower uncertainty to darker colours when using colour value, and to more saturated colours when using saturation to represent uncertainty. This was supported by Kubíček and Šašinka (2011) as the majority of participants picked the lighter values as the best choice for higher uncertainty (thus darker value corresponds to lower uncertainty).…”

Using Information Trustworthiness Advice in Decision Making

“…These span from the simple approaches utilising colour, shapes and blinking, to the more complex glyphs, contour lines and animation. More recent studies [16,17] have concentrated on evaluating some of these and other visualisation approaches, at times with the aim of supplying general guidance for designers to use. Bisantz et al [16] in particular, identify transparency, brightness and saturation as useful techniques to convey uncertainty provided that background images and the overall task context are considered.…”