Abstract
Latency in a visualization system is widely believed to affect user behavior in measurable ways, such as requiring the user to wait for the visualization system to respond, leading to interruption of the analytic flow. While this effect is frequently observed and widely accepted, precisely how latency affects different analysis scenarios is less well understood. In this paper, we examine the role of latency in the context of visual search, an essential task in data foraging and exploration using visualization. We conduct a series of studies on Amazon Mechanical Turk and find that under certain conditions, latency is a statistically significant predictor of visual search behavior, which is consistent with previous studies. However, our results also suggest that task type, task complexity, and other factors can modulate the effect of latency, in some cases rendering latency statistically insignificant in predicting user behavior. This suggests a more nuanced view of the role of latency than previously reported. Building on these results and the findings of prior studies, we propose design guidelines for measuring and interpreting the effects of latency when evaluating performance on visual search tasks.
Highlights
Even though both choices lead to success, more participants chose to search for the lower-latency target, suggesting that latency does play a role in modulating search strategy when the task itself is less complex
We did find a statistically significant effect (p < 0.01) from latency in our third Proposed Locations experiment. When considering these experiments together, the results suggest that latency becomes more prominent in lower complexity visual search tasks, leading us to a tentative answer for Question 2 (Q2): decreasing task complexity seems to amplify the effect of latency to the point of influencing users’ search strategies and their performance
We investigate the relationship between latency, task complexity and user performance
Summary
Often referred to as system response time (SRT), “latency” refers to the elapsed time between a user’s input to a system and the time when the system produces a response. In the HCI community, the effect of latency is a wellstudied topic. Dating back to work by Miller in 1968, research in SRT has long been driven by the need to identify requirements for responsive software [25]. The findings of SRT research are nuanced, design guidelines have begun to emerge. In 1984, Shneiderman summarized the existing literature [31], and established 100 milliseconds as the maximum SRT for interactive interfaces
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