arXiv subjects

Danielle Albers Szafir

Publications and source records attributed to Danielle Albers Szafir.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Multimodal Data Comprehension: Understanding How Visual-Textual Chains of Information Influence Data Interpretation

Visualizations and text often work together to support effective data communication. Despite this common paradigm, we know little about how the interplay of these modalities affects people's data comprehension. We present a novel experimental paradigm to investigate multimodal data comprehension---the process of people comprehending information from multimodal visual and textual data---across both crowdsourced and think-aloud environments. Our methodology employs two sequential chains for presenting multimodal information---a visualization-first chain and a text-first chain---asking people to describe the data presented iteratively. By comparing how people's data comprehension changes across the chain, we can assess the information contribution of each modality and how they shape subsequent comprehension. We found that the visualization-first chain facilitates exploratory comprehension with hypothesis-driven discovery, whereas the text-first chain yields confirmatory comprehension akin to framing effects where visualizations serve to reinforce and confirm observations drawn from text. Our findings provide empirical insights into multimodal information integration, with implications for designing more effective data-driven communication.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

CatPAL: Task-Aware Learning for Categorical Palette Recommendation

Designing effective categorical palettes requires balancing a range of factors, including perceptual distinctiveness, category count, and task effectiveness. The effectiveness of categorical encodings can vary substantially depending on the target analytical tasks; however, existing recommendation tools largely ignore task context when evaluating palette quality, resulting in inconsistent performance across tasks. We synthesize findings from a series of multi-stage user studies into a unified model of task-based effectiveness for color encodings, shape encodings, and their redundant combination across category counts and seven common scatterplot tasks. Our results show that task and palette choice jointly influence perceptual accuracy: different color and shape palettes exhibit varying levels of robustness across tasks, indicating that palette effectiveness is task-dependent. We estimate task-specific perceptual strengths for 39 colors and 39 shapes using Bradley-Terry models, refined through adaptive sampling to target uncertain and task-sensitive comparisons. We further quantify cross-channel interactions using a redundant gain Delta G metric to model performance across color and shape pairings. We then train a predictive model that scores candidate palettes based on task, category count, and perceptual features. This model drives effective palette recommendations in CatPAL, a task-aware palette recommendation system grounded in empirical data responsive to user constraints. Our findings highlight the importance of selecting categorical palettes aligned with specific analytical tasks and demonstrate how task-aware modeling enables more reliable palette design. CatPAL translates empirical results into a practical tool that supports user-specified colors or shapes and returns ranked palette recommendations adaptable to a range of tasks.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Redundant is Not Redundant: Automating Efficient Categorical Palette Design Unifying Color & Shape Encodings with CatPAW

Colors and shapes are commonly used to encode categories in multi-class scatterplots. Designers often combine the two channels to create redundant encodings, aiming to enhance class distinctions. However, evidence for the effectiveness of redundancy remains conflicted, and guidelines for constructing effective combinations are limited. This paper presents four crowdsourced experiments evaluating redundant color-shape encodings and identifying high-performing configurations across different category numbers. Results show that redundancy significantly improves accuracy in assessing class-level correlations, with the strongest benefits for 5-8 categories. We also find pronounced interaction effects between colors and shapes, underscoring the need for careful pairing in designing redundant encodings. Drawing on these findings, we introduce a categorical palette design tool that enables designers to construct empirically grounded palettes for effective categorical visualization. Our work advances understanding of categorical perception in data visualization by systematically identifying effective redundant color-shape combinations and embedding these insights into a practical palette design tool.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

From Vision to Touch: Bridging Visual and Tactile Principles for Accessible Data Representation

Tactile graphics are widely used to present maps and statistical diagrams to blind and low vision (BLV) people, with accessibility guidelines recommending their use for graphics where spatial relationships are important. Their use is expected to grow with the advent of commodity refreshable tactile displays. However, in stark contrast to visual information graphics, we lack a clear understanding of the benefits that well-designed tactile information graphics offer over text descriptions for BLV people. To address this gap, we introduce a framework considering the three components of encoding, perception and cognition to examine the known benefits for visual information graphics and explore their applicability to tactile information graphics. This work establishes a preliminary theoretical foundation for the tactile-first design of information graphics and identifies future research avenues.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Computational Design and Single-Wire Sensing of 3D Printed Objects with Integrated Capacitive Touchpoints

Producing interactive 3D printed objects currently requires laborious 3D design and post-instrumentation with off-the-shelf electronics. Multi-material 3D printing using conductive PLA presents opportunities to mitigate these challenges. We present a computational design pipeline that embeds multiple capacitive touchpoints into any 3D model that has a closed mesh without self-intersection. With our pipeline, users define touchpoints on the 3D object's surface to indicate interactive regions. Our pipeline then automatically generates a conductive path to connect the touch regions. This path is optimized to output unique resistor-capacitor delays when each region is touched, resulting in all regions being able to be sensed through a double-wire or single-wire connection. We illustrate our approach's utility with five computational and sensing performance evaluations (achieving 93.35% mean accuracy for single-wire) and six application examples. Our sensing technique supports existing uses (e.g., prototyping) and highlights the growing promise to produce interactive devices entirely with 3D printing. Project website: https://github.com/d-rep-lab/3dp-singlewire-sensing

cs.GR↗

arXiv2025

Characterizing Visualization Perception with Psychological Phenomena: Uncovering the Role of Subitizing in Data Visualization

Understanding how people perceive visualizations is crucial for designing effective visual data representations; however, many heuristic design guidelines are derived from specific tasks or visualization types, without considering the constraints or conditions under which those guidelines hold. In this work, we aimed to assess existing design heuristics for categorical visualization using well-established psychological knowledge. Specifically, we examine the impact of the subitizing phenomenon in cognitive psychology -- people's ability to automatically recognize a small set of objects instantly without counting -- in data visualizations. We conducted three experiments with multi-class scatterplots -- between 2 and 15 classes with varying design choices -- across three different tasks -- class estimation, correlation comparison, and clustering judgments -- to understand how performance changes as the number of classes (and therefore set size) increases. Our results indicate if the category number is smaller than six, people tend to perform well at all tasks, providing empirical evidence of subitizing in visualization. When category numbers increased, performance fell, with the magnitude of the performance change depending on task and encoding. Our study bridges the gap between heuristic guidelines and empirical evidence by applying well-established psychological theories, suggesting future opportunities for using psychological theories and constructs to characterize visualization perception.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Understanding User Needs for Injury Recovery with Augmented Reality

Physical therapy (PT) plays a crucial role in muscle injury recovery, but people struggle to adhere to and perform PT exercises correctly from home. To support challenges faced with in-home PT, augmented reality (AR) holds promise in enhancing patient's engagement and accuracy through immersive interactive visualizations. However, effectively leveraging AR requires a better understanding of patient needs during injury recovery. Through interviews with six individuals undergoing physical therapy, this paper introduces user-centered design considerations integrating AR and body motion data to enhance in-home PT for injury recovery. Our findings identify key challenges and propose design variables for future body-based visualizations of body motion data for PT.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Striking the Right Balance: Systematic Assessment of Evaluation Method Distribution Across Contribution Types

In the rapidly evolving field of information visualization, rigorous evaluation is essential for validating new techniques, understanding user interactions, and demonstrating the effectiveness and usability of visualizations. Faithful evaluations provide valuable insights into how users interact with and perceive the system, enabling designers to identify potential weaknesses and make informed decisions about design choices and improvements. However, an emerging trend of multiple evaluations within a single research raises critical questions about the sustainability, feasibility, and methodological rigor of such an approach. New researchers and students, influenced by this trend, may believe -- multiple evaluations are necessary for a study, regardless of the contribution types. However, the number of evaluations in a study should depend on its contributions and merits, not on the trend of including multiple evaluations to strengthen a paper. So, how many evaluations are enough? This is a situational question and cannot be formulaically determined. Our objective is to summarize current trends and patterns to assess the distribution of evaluation methods over different paper contribution types. In this paper, we identify this trend through a non-exhaustive literature survey of evaluation patterns in 214 papers in the two most recent years' VIS issues in IEEE TVCG from 2023 and 2024. We then discuss various evaluation strategy patterns in the information visualization field to guide practical choices and how this paper will open avenues for further discussion.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Shape It Up: An Empirically Grounded Approach for Designing Shape Palettes

Shape is commonly used to distinguish between categories in multi-class scatterplots. However, existing guidelines for choosing effective shape palettes rely largely on intuition and do not consider how these needs may change as the number of categories increases. Although shapes can be a finite number compared to colors, they can not be represented by a numerical space, making it difficult to propose a general guideline for shape choices or shed light on the design heuristics of designer-crafted shape palettes. This paper presents a series of four experiments evaluating the efficiency of 39 shapes across three tasks -- relative mean judgment tasks, expert choices, and data correlation estimation. Given how complex and tangled results are, rather than relying on conventional features for modeling, we built a model and introduced a corresponding design tool that offers recommendations for shape encodings. The perceptual effectiveness of shapes significantly varies across specific pairs, and certain shapes may enhance perceptual efficiency and accuracy. However, how performance varies does not map well to classical features of shape such as angles, fill, or convex hull. We developed a model based on pairwise relations between shapes measured in our experiments and the number of shapes required to intelligently recommend shape palettes for a given design. This tool provides designers with agency over shape selection while incorporating empirical elements of perceptual performance captured in our study. Our model advances the understanding of shape perception in visualization contexts and provides practical design guidelines for advanced shape usage in visualization design that optimize perceptual efficiency.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Our Stories, Our Data: Co-designing Visualizations with People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) have unique needs and challenges when working with data. While visualization aims to make data more accessible to a broad audience, our understanding of how to design cognitively accessible visualizations remains limited. In this study, we engaged 20 participants with IDD as co-designers to explore how they approach and visualize data. Our preliminary investigation paired four participants as data pen-pals in a six-week online asynchronous participatory design workshop. In response to the observed conceptual, technological, and emotional struggles with data, we subsequently organized a two-day in-person co-design workshop with 16 participants to further understand relevant visualization authoring and sensemaking strategies. Reflecting on how participants engaged with and represented data, we propose two strategies for cognitively accessible data visualizations: transforming numbers into narratives and blending data design with everyday aesthetics. Our findings emphasize the importance of involving individuals with IDD in the design process, demonstrating their capacity for data analysis and expression, and underscoring the need for a narrative and tangible approach to accessible data visualization.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

A Qualitative Analysis of Common Practices in Annotations: A Taxonomy and Design Space

Annotations play a vital role in highlighting critical aspects of visualizations, aiding in data externalization and exploration, collaborative sensemaking, and visual storytelling. However, despite their widespread use, we identified a lack of a design space for common practices for annotations. In this paper, we evaluated over 1,800 static annotated charts to understand how people annotate visualizations in practice. Through qualitative coding of these diverse real-world annotated charts, we explored three primary aspects of annotation usage patterns: analytic purposes for chart annotations (e.g., present, identify, summarize, or compare data features), mechanisms for chart annotations (e.g., types and combinations of annotations used, frequency of different annotation types across chart types, etc.), and the data source used to generate the annotations. We then synthesized our findings into a design space of annotations, highlighting key design choices for chart annotations. We presented three case studies illustrating our design space as a practical framework for chart annotations to enhance the communication of visualization insights. All supplemental materials are available at {https://shorturl.at/bAGM1}.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

PD-Insighter: A Visual Analytics System to Monitor Daily Actions for Parkinson's Disease Treatment

People with Parkinson's Disease (PD) can slow the progression of their symptoms with physical therapy. However, clinicians lack insight into patients' motor function during daily life, preventing them from tailoring treatment protocols to patient needs. This paper introduces PD-Insighter, a system for comprehensive analysis of a person's daily movements for clinical review and decision-making. PD-Insighter provides an overview dashboard for discovering motor patterns and identifying critical deficits during activities of daily living and an immersive replay for closely studying the patient's body movements with environmental context. Developed using an iterative design study methodology in consultation with clinicians, we found that PD-Insighter's ability to aggregate and display data with respect to time, actions, and local environment enabled clinicians to assess a person's overall functioning during daily life outside the clinic. PD-Insighter's design offers future guidance for generalized multiperspective body motion analytics, which may significantly improve clinical decision-making and slow the functional decline of PD and other medical conditions.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Revisiting Categorical Color Perception in Scatterplots: Sequential, Diverging, and Categorical Palettes

Existing guidelines for categorical color selection are heuristic, often grounded in intuition rather than empirical studies of readers' abilities. While design conventions recommend palettes maximize hue differences, more recent exploratory findings indicate other factors, such as lightness, may play a role in effective categorical palette design. We conducted a crowdsourced experiment on mean value judgments in multi-class scatterplots using five color palette families--single-hue sequential, multi-hue sequential, perceptually-uniform multi-hue sequential, diverging, and multi-hue categorical--that differ in how they manipulate hue and lightness. Participants estimated relative mean positions in scatterplots containing 2 to 10 categories using 20 colormaps. Our results confirm heuristic guidance that hue-based categorical palettes are most effective. However, they also provide additional evidence that scalable categorical encoding relies on more than hue variance.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Cieran: Designing Sequential Colormaps via In-Situ Active Preference Learning

Quality colormaps can help communicate important data patterns. However, finding an aesthetically pleasing colormap that looks "just right" for a given scenario requires significant design and technical expertise. We introduce Cieran, a tool that allows any data analyst to rapidly find quality colormaps while designing charts within Jupyter Notebooks. Our system employs an active preference learning paradigm to rank expert-designed colormaps and create new ones from pairwise comparisons, allowing analysts who are novices in color design to tailor colormaps to their data context. We accomplish this by treating colormap design as a path planning problem through the CIELAB colorspace with a context-specific reward model. In an evaluation with twelve scientists, we found that Cieran effectively modeled user preferences to rank colormaps and leveraged this model to create new quality designs. Our work shows the potential of active preference learning for supporting efficient visualization design optimization.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Do You See What I See? A Qualitative Study Eliciting High-Level Visualization Comprehension

Designers often create visualizations to achieve specific high-level analytical or communication goals. These goals require people to naturally extract complex, contextualized, and interconnected patterns in data. While limited prior work has studied general high-level interpretation, prevailing perceptual studies of visualization effectiveness primarily focus on isolated, predefined, low-level tasks, such as estimating statistical quantities. This study more holistically explores visualization interpretation to examine the alignment between designers' communicative goals and what their audience sees in a visualization, which we refer to as their comprehension. We found that statistics people effectively estimate from visualizations in classical graphical perception studies may differ from the patterns people intuitively comprehend in a visualization. We conducted a qualitative study on three types of visualizations -- line graphs, bar graphs, and scatterplots -- to investigate the high-level patterns people naturally draw from a visualization. Participants described a series of graphs using natural language and think-aloud protocols. We found that comprehension varies with a range of factors, including graph complexity and data distribution. Specifically, 1) a visualization's stated objective often does not align with people's comprehension, 2) results from traditional experiments may not predict the knowledge people build with a graph, and 3) chart type alone is insufficient to predict the information people extract from a graph. Our study confirms the importance of defining visualization effectiveness from multiple perspectives to assess and inform visualization practices.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Empowering People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities through Cognitively Accessible Visualizations

Data has transformative potential to empower people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD). However, conventional data visualizations often rely on complex cognitive processes, and existing approaches for day-to-day analysis scenarios fail to consider neurodivergent capabilities, creating barriers for people with IDD to access data and leading to even further marginalization. We argue that visualizations could be an equalizer for people with IDD to participate in data-driven conversations. Drawing on preliminary research findings and our experiences working with people with IDD and their data, we introduce and expand on the concept of cognitively accessible visualizations, unpack its meaning and roles in increasing IDD individuals' access to data, and discuss two immediate research objectives. Specifically, we argue that cognitively accessible visualizations should support people with IDD in personal data storytelling for effective self-advocacy and self-expression, and balance novelty and familiarity in data design to accommodate cognitive diversity and promote inclusivity.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Effects of data distribution and granularity on color semantics for colormap data visualizations

To create effective data visualizations, it helps to represent data using visual features in intuitive ways. When visualization designs match observer expectations, visualizations are easier to interpret. Prior work suggests that several factors influence such expectations. For example, the dark-is-more bias leads observers to infer that darker colors map to larger quantities, and the opaque-is-more bias leads them to infer that regions appearing more opaque (given the background color) map to larger quantities. Previous work suggested that the background color only plays a role if visualizations appear to vary in opacity. The present study challenges this claim. We hypothesized that the background color modulate inferred mappings for colormaps that should not appear to vary in opacity (by previous measures) if the visualization appeared to have a "hole" that revealed the background behind the map (hole hypothesis). We found that spatial aspects of the map contributed to inferred mappings, though the effects were inconsistent with the hole hypothesis. Our work raises new questions about how spatial distributions of data influence color semantics in colormap data visualizations.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

A Computational Design Pipeline to Fabricate Sensing Network Physicalizations

Interaction is critical for data analysis and sensemaking. However, designing interactive physicalizations is challenging as it requires cross-disciplinary knowledge in visualization, fabrication, and electronics. Interactive physicalizations are typically produced in an unstructured manner, resulting in unique solutions for a specific dataset, problem, or interaction that cannot be easily extended or adapted to new scenarios or future physicalizations. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a computational design pipeline to 3D print network physicalizations with integrated sensing capabilities. Networks are ubiquitous, yet their complex geometry also requires significant engineering considerations to provide intuitive, effective interactions for exploration. Using our pipeline, designers can readily produce network physicalizations supporting selection-the most critical atomic operation for interaction-by touch through capacitive sensing and computational inference. Our computational design pipeline introduces a new design paradigm by concurrently considering the form and interactivity of a physicalization into one cohesive fabrication workflow. We evaluate our approach using (i) computational evaluations, (ii) three usage scenarios focusing on general visualization tasks, and (iii) expert interviews. The design paradigm introduced by our pipeline can lower barriers to physicalization research, creation, and adoption.

cs.HC↗