Gaze analysis of user characteristics in magazine style narrative visualizations

Abstract

Previous research has shown that various user characteristics (e.g., cognitive abilities, personality traits, and learning abilities) can influence user experience during information visualization tasks. These findings have prompted researchers to investigate user-adaptive information visualizations that can help users by providing personalized support based on their specific needs. Whereas existing work has been mostly limited to tasks involving just visualizations, the aim of our research is to broaden this work to include scenarios where users process textual documents with embedded visualizations, i.e., Magazine Style Narrative Visualizations, or MSNVs for short. In this paper, we analyze eye tracking data collected from a user study with MSNVs to uncover processing behaviors that are negatively impacting user experience (i.e., time on task) for users with low abilities in these user characteristics. Our analysis leverages Linear Mixed-Effects Models to evaluate the relationships among user characteristics, gaze processing behaviors, and task performance. Our results identify several MSNV processing behaviors within the visualization that contribute to poor task performance for users with low reading proficiency. For instance, we identify that users with low reading proficiency transition significantly more often compared to their counterparts between relevant and non-relevant bars, and transition more often from bars to the labels. We present our findings as a step toward designing user-adaptive support mechanisms to alleviate these difficulties with MSNVs, and provide suggestions on how our results can be leveraged for creating a set of meaningful interventions for future evaluation (e.g., dynamically highlighting relevant bars and labels in the visualization to help users with low reading proficiency locate them more effectively).