Abstract
Suitability of colour hue, value, and transparency for geographic relevance encoding in mobile maps
Highlights
With the study we address following research questions: 1) which of the three visual variables optimally directs visual attention on small screen maps to the correct encoding of the geographic relevance? 2) do users understand the encoding of the three visual variables into three levels of high, medium and low geographic relevance of POI? and 3) do established cartographic conventions, such as value (‘the darker, the more’) and the traffic light metaphor work on small displays? These research questions address the saliency of POI symbols, their semantic understanding, and cartographic conventions
The first part of our experiment yields no statistically significant differences between the three visual variables, which might be due to the lack of a concrete, goal-directed task
Our results suggest that only the visual variable transparency seems to reliably encode geographic relevance and is intuitively and correctly perceived by participants
Summary
Switzerland, tumasch.reichenbacher@geo.uzh.ch * Corresponding author Keywords: mobile maps, geographic relevance, visual variables, colour hue, value, transparency With presenting results from an empirical study on the suitability of the visual variables colour hue, value, and transparency for visually communicating the geographic relevance of points of interest (POI) on mobile maps, we aim at contributing to close this research gap. With the study we address following research questions: 1) which of the three visual variables (colour hue, value, and transparency) optimally directs visual attention on small screen maps to the correct encoding of the geographic relevance?
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