Understanding transitions in animated bar charts

Abstract

Animated bar charts have gained popularity on the Internet for their ability to display historical rankings through smooth animated transitions that clearly show the rankings over time. To investigate the usage scenarios of these charts, we analyzed the pop-up comments to understand viewers’ focus. Our findings suggest that animated transitions play a key role in viewers’ perception of ranking changes. We summarized various transition methods and evaluated their impact on user perception and memory through user experiments. We also conducted a detailed analysis of each transition method’s implementation. Our research sheds light on the effectiveness of different transition strategies for animated bar charts.