arXiv subjects

Petra Isenberg

Publications and source records attributed to Petra Isenberg.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Guidelines Are Not Rules: Characterizing Terminologies around Visualization Design Guidelines

A common expectation in visualization research is that outcomes recommend how researchers and practitioners take action or make design decisions. We often express these as "guidelines." Yet, the term "guideline" is both ambiguous and loosely defined, and what one researcher considers a guideline may be too broad, too loose, or too strict for another. We take a closer look at a broader set of terms that can express desirable results around visualization research, and untangle how these words are understood in the community in relation to other similar terms. We base our work on an exploratory study with experts, followed by a crowdsourcing study with a separate mapping phase (n=30) and rating phase (n=42) targeting input from the broader visualization community, and an analysis of the use of terminology in 3,877 IEEE VIS papers published from 1990 to 2024. Based on our findings, we call for more nuanced, precise discussions of research outcomes and their communication to the broader community, including practitioners and students.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Authoring Narrative Visualization in Motion: Visual Storytelling in Swimming Videos

We investigate how to support authoring narrative visualizations in motion in sports videos, drawing on automated data preparation, systematic analysis, technology probe design, and evaluation, using swimming races as a case study. Sports videos are widely broadcast and shared across social media, where content creators increasingly seek to present and explain complex events to general audiences. Visualization in motion has been explored as an efficient way to embed data into videos and to move with the data referents, providing additional information and helping audiences understand races. However, existing approaches primarily focus on embedding visualizations in videos, lacking exploration of how to support authoring narratives that coordinate views, data, and temporal progression to explain the unfolding races. To address this gap, we use swimming videos as an ideal case for exploration, as swimming is a sport with rich, dynamic data and visualizations in practice. We develop an automated pipeline that extracts structured data from videos, derive narrative constructs through observational analysis of sports broadcasts, and design a technology probe that supports authoring using data prepared by our pipeline and narrative constructs derived from our observations. We evaluate our approach with experienced content creators and/or graphic designers to examine the benefits and challenges of authoring narrative visualizations in motion. All supplemental materials are described in the Supplemental Material Pointers section and are on OSF: osf.io/bq47n/.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Review and Analysis of Scientific Paper Embellishments

We present a review and analysis of scientific paper embellishments -- simple visual elements that are deeply integrated into the text of scientific publications. These embellishments are increasingly used in research papers, which have the potential to enhance textual descriptions, strengthen connections between figures and content, and improve internal textual coherence, while also carrying the risk of disrupting the reading experience. As their exact impact is not yet well understood, we conducted a systematic review of all visualization papers published between 2019 and 2024 in IEEE VIS, ACM CHI, and EuroVis. From this corpus, we identified 374 papers that used paper embellishments and distilled three key dimensions that characterize their usage: purposes (WHY), design choices (HOW), and locations (WHERE) of paper embellishments. Our findings provide a structured perspective on the form of current embellishments in scientific writing in the visualization domain and provide insights into their role in shaping scientific communication.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2025

Color, Gender, and Bias: Examining the Role of Stereotyped Colors in Visualization-Driven Pay Decisions

We investigate the impact of stereotyped gender-color associations in a visualization-driven decision-making task. In the context of gender data visualization, the well-known "pink for girls and blue for boys" color assignment is associated with stereotypes that could bias readers and decision-makers. Understanding the effects of using stereotyped colors in visualizations for decision-making can help designers better choose colors in stereotype-prone contexts. We therefore explore the potential impact of stereotyped colors on compensation decision-making through two crowdsourced experiments. In these experiments, we evaluate how the association of color with gender (stereotyped vs non-stereotyped) affects the user's allocation decisions in the context of salary adjustments. Our results indicate that explicit expression of the color-gender associations, in the form of a legend on the data visualization, leads to in-group favoritism. However, in the absence of a legend, this in-group favoritism disappears, and a small effect of non-stereotyped colors is observed. A free copy of this paper with all supplemental materials is available at https://osf.io/d4q3v/?view_only=22b636d6f7bb4a7991d9576933b3aaad

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Visualization on Smart Wristbands: Results from an In-situ Design Workshop with Four Scenarios

We present the results of an in-situ ideation workshop for designing data visualizations on smart wristbands that can show data around the entire wrist of a wearer. Wristbands pose interesting challenges because the visibility of different areas of the band depends on the wearer's arm posture. We focused on four usage scenarios that lead to different postures: office work, leisurely walks, cycling, and driving. As the technology for smart wristbands is not yet commercially available, we conducted a paper-based ideation exercise that showed how spatial layout and visualization design on smart wristbands may need to vary depending on the types of data items of interest and arm postures. Participants expressed a strong preference for responsive visualization designs that could adapt to the movement of wearers' arms. Supplemental material from the study is available here: https://osf.io/4hrca/.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Reframing Pattern: A Comprehensive Approach to a Composite Visual Variable

We present a new comprehensive theory for explaining, exploring, and using pattern as a visual variable in visualization. Although patterns have long been used for data encoding and continue to be valuable today, their conceptual foundations are precarious: the concepts and terminology used across the research literature and in practice are inconsistent, making it challenging to use patterns effectively and to conduct research to inform their use. To address this problem, we conduct a comprehensive cross-disciplinary literature review that clarifies ambiguities around the use of "pattern" and "texture". As a result, we offer a new consistent treatment of pattern as a composite visual variable composed of structured groups of graphic primitives that can serve as marks for encoding data individually and collectively. This new and widely applicable formulation opens a sizable design space for the visual variable pattern, which we formalize as a new system comprising three sets of variables: the spatial arrangement of primitives, the appearance relationships among primitives, and the retinal visual variables that characterize individual primitives. We show how our pattern system relates to existing visualization theory and highlight opportunities for visualization design. We further explore patterns based on complex spatial arrangements, demonstrating explanatory power and connecting our conceptualization to broader theory on maps and cartography. An author version and additional materials are available on OSF: osf.io/z7ae2.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Perception of Visual Variables on Virtual Wall-Sized Tiled Displays in Immersive Environments

We investigate the perception of visual variables on wall-sized tiled displays within an immersive environment. We designed and conducted two formal user studies focusing on elementary visualization reading tasks in VR. The first study compared three different virtual display arrangements (Flat, Cylinder, and Cockpit). It showed that participants made smaller errors on virtual curved walls (Cylinder and Cockpit) compared to Flat. Following that, we compared the results with those from a previous study conducted in a real-world setting. The comparative analysis showed that virtual curved walls resulted in smaller errors than the real-world flat wall display, but with longer task completion time. The second study evaluated the impact of four 3D user interaction techniques (Selection, Walking, Steering, and Teleportation) on performing the elementary task on the virtual Flat wall display. The results confirmed that interaction techniques further improved task performance. Finally, we discuss the limitations and future work.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Toward Understanding the Experiences of People in Late Adulthood with Embedded Information Displays in the Home

Embedded information displays (EIDs) are becoming increasingly ubiquitous on home appliances and devices such as microwaves, coffee machines, fridges, or digital thermostats. These displays are often multi-purpose, functioning as interfaces for selecting device settings, communicating operating status using simple visualizations, and displaying notifications. However, their usability for people in the late adulthood (PLA) development stage is not well-understood. We report on two focus groups with PLA (n = 11, ages 76-94) from a local retirement community. Participants were shown images of everyday home electronics and appliances, answering questions about their experiences using the EIDs. Using open coding, we qualitatively analyzed their comments to distill key themes regarding how EIDs can negatively affect PLA's ability to take in information (e.g., poor labels) and interact with these devices (e.g., unintuitive steps) alongside strategies employed to work around these issues. We argue that understanding the equitable design and communication of devices' functions, operating status, and messages is important for future information display designers. We hope this work stimulates further investigation into more equitable EID design.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Situated Visualization in Motion for Swimming

Competitive sports coverage increasingly includes information on athlete or team statistics and records. Sports video coverage has traditionally embedded representations of this data in fixed locations on the screen, but more recently also attached representations to athletes or other targets in motion. These publicly used representations so far have been rather simple and systematic investigations of the research space of embedded visualizations in motion are still missing. Here we report on our preliminary research in the domain of professional and amateur swimming. We analyzed how visualizations are currently added to the coverage of Olympics swimming competitions and then plan to derive a design space for embedded data representations for swimming competitions. We are currently conducting a crowdsourced survey to explore which kind of swimming-related data general audiences are interested in, in order to identify opportunities for additional visualizations to be added to swimming competition coverage.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Visualization in Motion in Video Games for Different Types of Data

We contribute an analysis of situated visualizations in motion in video games for different types of data, with a focus on quantitative and categorical data representations. Video games convey a lot of data to players, to help them succeed in the game. These visualizations frequently move across the screen due to camera changes or because the game elements themselves move. Our ultimate goal is to understand how motion factors affect visualization readability in video games and subsequently the players' performance in the game. We started our work by surveying the characteristics of how motion currently influences which kind of data representations in video games. We conducted a systematic review of 160 visualizations in motion in video games and extracted patterns and considerations regarding was what, and how visualizations currently exhibit motion factors in video games.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Situated Visualization in Motion

We contribute a first design space on visualizations in motion and the design of a pilot study we plan to run in the fall. Visualizations can be useful in contexts where either the observation is in motion or the whole visualization is moving at various speeds. Imagine, for example, displays attached to an athlete or animal that show data about the wearer -- for example, captured from a fitness tracking band; or a visualization attached to a moving object such as a vehicle or a soccer ball. The ultimate goal of our research is to inform the design of visualizations under motion.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Situated Visualization in Motion for Video Games

We contribute a systematic review of situated visualizations in motion in the context of video games. Video games produce rich dynamic datasets during gameplay that are often visualized to help players succeed in a game. Often these visualizations are moving either because they are attached to moving game elements or due to camera changes. We want to understand to what extent this motion and contextual game factors impact how players can read these visualizations. In order to ground our work, we surveyed 160 visualizations in motion and their embeddings in the game world. Here, we report on our analysis and categorization of these visualizations.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Envisioning Situated Visualizations of Environmental Footprints in an Urban Environment

We present the results of a brainstorming exercise focused on how situated visualizations could be used to better understand the state of the environment and our personal behavioral impact on it. Specifically, we conducted a day long workshop in the French city of Bordeaux where we envisioned situated visualizations of urban environmental footprints. We explored the city and took photos and notes about possible situated visualizations of environmental footprints that could be embedded near places, people, or objects of interest. We found that our designs targeted four purposes and used four different methods that could be further explored to test situated visualizations for the protection of the environment.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Reflections on Visualization in Motion for Fitness Trackers

In this paper, we reflect on our past work towards understanding how to design visualizations for fitness trackers that are used in motion. We have coined the term "visualization in motion" for visualizations that are used in the presence of relative motion between a viewer and the visualization. Here, we describe how visualization in motion is relevant to sports scenarios. We also provide new data on current smartwatch visualizations for sports and discuss future challenges for visualizations in motion for fitness tracker.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Collecting Information Needs for Egocentric Visualizations while Running

We investigate research challenges and opportunities for visualization in motion during outdoor physical activities via an initial corpus of real-world recordings that pair egocentric video, biometrics, and think-aloud observations. With the increasing use of tracking and recording devices, such as smartwatches and head-mounted displays, more and more data are available in real-time about a person's activity and the context of the activity. However, not all data will be relevant all the time. Instead, athletes have information needs that change throughout their activity depending on the context and their performance. To address this challenge, we describe the collection of a diverse corpus of information needs paired with contextualizing audio, video, and sensor data. Next, we propose a first set of research challenges and design considerations that explore the difficulties of visualizing those real data needs in-context and demonstrate a prototype tool for browsing, aggregating, and analyzing this information. Our ultimate goal is to understand and support embedding visualizations into outdoor contexts with changing environments and varying data needs.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Talk to the Wall: The Role of Speech Interaction in Collaborative Visual Analytics

We present the results of an exploratory study on how pairs interact with speech commands and touch gestures on a wall-sized display during a collaborative sensemaking task. Previous work has shown that speech commands, alone or in combination with other input modalities, can support visual data exploration by individuals. However, it is still unknown whether and how speech commands can be used in collaboration, and for what tasks. To answer these questions, we developed a functioning prototype that we used as a technology probe. We conducted an in-depth exploratory study with 10 participant pairs to analyze their interaction choices, the interplay between the input modalities, and their collaboration. While touch was the most used modality, we found that participants preferred speech commands for global operations, used them for distant interaction, and that speech interaction contributed to the awareness of the partner's actions. Furthermore, the likelihood of using speech commands during collaboration was related to the personality trait of agreeableness. Regarding collaboration styles, participants interacted with speech equally often whether they were in loosely or closely coupled collaboration. While the partners stood closer to each other during close collaboration, they did not distance themselves to use speech commands. From our findings, we derive and contribute a set of design considerations for collaborative and multimodal interactive data analysis systems. All supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/8gpv2

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

User Experience of Visualizations in Motion: A Case Study and Design Considerations

We present a systematic review, an empirical study, and a first set of considerations for designing visualizations in motion, derived from a concrete scenario in which these visualizations were used to support a primary task. In practice, when viewers are confronted with embedded visualizations, they often have to focus on a primary task and can only quickly glance at a visualization showing rich, often dynamically updated, information. As such, the visualizations must be designed so as not to distract from the primary task, while at the same time being readable and useful for aiding the primary task. For example, in games, players who are engaged in a battle have to look at their enemies but also read the remaining health of their own game character from the health bar over their character's head. Many trade-offs are possible in the design of embedded visualizations in such dynamic scenarios, which we explore in-depth in this paper with a focus on user experience. We use video games as an example of an application context with a rich existing set of visualizations in motion. We begin our work with a systematic review of in-game visualizations in motion. Next, we conduct an empirical user study to investigate how different embedded visualizations in motion designs impact user experience. We conclude with a set of considerations and trade-offs for designing visualizations in motion more broadly as derived from what we learned about video games. All supplemental materials of this paper are available at https://osf.io/3v8wm/}.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Micro Visualizations on a Smartwatch: Assessing Reading Performance While Walking

With two studies, we assess how different walking trajectories (straight line, circular, and infinity) and speeds (2 km/h, 4 km/h, and 6 km/h) influence the accuracy and response time of participants reading micro visualizations on a smartwatch. We showed our participants common watch face micro visualizations including date, time, weather information, and four complications showing progress charts of fitness data. Our findings suggest that while walking trajectories did not significantly affect reading performance, overall walking activity, especially at high speeds, hurt reading accuracy and, to some extent, response time.

cs.HC↗