Remote Usability Assessment of Topic Visualization Interfaces with Public Participation Data: A Case Study

Ivania Yovanovic,Iñaki Goñi,Constanza Miranda

doi:10.29379/jedem.v13i1.640

Abstract

Citizen participation often faces challenges of transparency and accountability. Visualizations’s usability becomes key for public consultation activities. The tree map is frequently used to disseminate data and to give it back to the population. The purpose of this study is to understand how tree maps and stacked barcharts differ in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in tasks, like solving topic categorization and comparison analysis tasks. An experimental design was used to examine user performance based on a task-based usability test. 34 participants interacted remotely with data visualizations from an open 2016 participatory constitution-making process. The ANOVA showed that stacked barcharts work significantly better for comparison tasks than the tree map, but there are no significant differences in regards to categorization tasks. Public participation initiatives should first determine what cognitive operations their users perform before deciding which visualization interfaces will be more useful for the intended public.

Highlights

‘Citizen participation’ is a broad category that describes citizen involvement in public decision making (Irvin & Stansbury, 2004)
Our study explores usability measures in visualization interfaces for topic modeling of citizen consultations in a case of participatory constitution-making in Chile
The behavior of the usability metrics follows a similar pattern in both interfaces, in which the mean were relatively close in categorization tasks (T1 and T2), and relatively far in comparison tasks (T3 and T4)

Summary

Introduction

‘Citizen participation’ is a broad category that describes citizen involvement in public decision making (Irvin & Stansbury, 2004). These range from manipulation as its weakest form; to the most complete which is direct citizen control. Beyond the topic of constitution-making, several countries have used Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to organize and classify the content of their public consultations (Noveck, 2018). The end results of this sort of automated analysis may be difficult for citizens to understand (Cai, Sun & Sha, 2018) This is why many public participation exercises accompany data analysis with visualizations tools to increase the usability of the information gathered (Roque de Oliveira & Partidário, 2020). Other visualization strategies such as stacked bar charts, may offer a better way of encoding data for precise comparisons

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Conclusion