Which aesthetic has the greatest effect on human understanding?

Abstract

Abstract. In the creation of graph drawing algorithms and systems, designers claim that by producing layouts that optimise certain aesthetic qualities, the graphs are easier to understand. Such aesthetics include maximise symmetry, minimise edge crosses and minimise bends.A previous study aimed to validate these claims with respect to three aesthetics, using paper-based experiments [11]. The study reported here is superior in many ways: five aesthetics are considered, attempts are made to place a priority order on the relative importance of the aesthetics, the experiments are run on-line, and the ease of understanding the drawings is measured in time, as well as in the number of errors. In addition, greater consideration is given to the possible effect of confounding factors in the graph drawings.The results indicate that reducing the number of edge crosses is by far the most important aesthetic, while minimising the number of bends and maximising symmetry have a lesser effect. The effects of maximising the minimum angle between edges leaving a node and of fixing edges and nodes to an orthogonal grid are not statistically significant. This work is important since it helps to demonstrate to algorithm and system designers the aesthetic qualities most important for aiding human understanding, the most appropriate compromises to make when there is a conflict in aesthetics, and consequently, how to build more effective systems.

On the Usability of Lombardi Graph Drawings

“…While readability of graph drawings has been examined before and is known to depend on many factors (experimental studies point to edge crossings and angular resolution as having significant impact [4]), these evaluated only straight-line and polyline drawings. To the best of our knowledge, no empirical studies have been performed on Lombardi drawings.…”

Managing Structural and Textual Quality of Business Process Models

“…Corresponding support was found in an experiment in [20]. The visual layout of the model graph is also well-known for its importance to facilitate good understanding [21,22]. In this section, we focus on structural properties of the process model and properties of its text labels.…”

Crowdsourcing for Information Visualization: Promises and Pitfalls

“…Path tracing is a frequently used task for graph evaluation [83,102,73,55], and would be considered a connectivity task in the graph task taxonomy of Lee at al. [61].…”