arXiv subjects

Pierre Dragicevic

Publications and source records attributed to Pierre Dragicevic.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From Statistics to Individuals: An Exploration of Zoomable Empathic Visualizations

Data visualization is a powerful tool for conveying statistical information, but when representing populations, it tends to hide individuals. We introduce Zoomable Empathic Visualizations (ZEVs), interactive experiences allowing users to smoothly navigate between abstract statistical visualizations and more qualitative, relatable representations focused on individuals. We present three use cases of ZEVs and report on a qualitative user study that highlights opportunities for deeper understanding and emotional engagement, while pointing to areas for improvement and further refinement. In summary, ZEVs point toward new approaches for revealing the individuals behind the data.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Progressive Value Reading: The Use of Motion to Gradually Examine Data Involving Large Magnitudes

People often struggle to interpret data with extremely large or small values, or ranges spanning multiple orders of magnitude. While traditional approaches, such as log scales and multiscale visualizations, can help, we explore in this article a different approach used in some emerging designs: the use of motion to let viewers gradually experience magnitude -- for example, interactive graphics that require long scrolling or street paintings stretching hundreds of meters. This approach typically demands substantial time and sustained interaction, translating differences in magnitude into a visceral sense of duration and effort. Although largely underexplored, this design strategy offers new opportunities. We introduce the term progressive value reading to refer to the use of motion to progressively examine an information object that encodes a value, where the amount of motion reflects the value. We compiled a corpus of 55 real-life and hypothetical visualization examples that allow, encourage, or require progressive value reading. From this corpus, we derived a design space of ten design dimensions, providing a shared vocabulary, inspiration for novel techniques, and a foundation for empirical evaluation. An online corpus is also available for exploration.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Investigating How Music Affects Persuasion, Engagement, and Emotion in Data Videos

Data videos have become a prominent vessel for communicating data to broad audiences, and a common object of study in information visualization. Many of these videos include music, yet the impact of music on how people experience data videos remains largely unexplored. We conducted a preregistered study into the effect of music across three dimensions: persuasion, engagement, and emotion. We showed online participants an existing data video (1) without any music, (2) with its generic default music, and (3) with custom music designed by a professional composer. We found that the default music helped make the data video more persuasive. However, the effects of custom music were more mixed, and we did not find that music increased engagement. In addition, and contrary to our expectations, our participants reported more intense emotions without music. Our study contributes new insights into the intersection of music and data visualization and is a first step toward guiding designers in creating impactful data-driven narratives.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

WSCoach: Wearable Real-time Auditory Feedback for Reducing Unwanted Words in Daily Communication

The rise of wearable smart devices raises unprecedented opportunities for self-improvement through ubiquitous behavior tracking and guidance. However, the design of effective wearable behavior intervention systems remains relatively unexplored. To address this gap, we conducted controlled studies focusing on the reduction of unwanted words (e.g., filler words, swear words) in daily communication through auditory feedback using wearable technology. We started with a design space exploration, considering various factors such as the type, duration, and timing of the auditory feedback. Then, we conducted pilot studies to reduce the space of design choices and prototyped a system called WSCoach (Wearable Speech Coach), which informs users when they utter unwanted words in near-real-time. To evaluate WSCoach, we compared it with a state-of-the-art mobile application supporting post-hoc conversation analysis. Both approaches were effective in reducing the occurrence of unwanted words, but WSCoach appears to be more effective in the long run. Finally, we discuss guidelines for the design of wearable audio-based behavior monitoring and intervention systems and highlight the potential of wearable technology for facilitating behavior correction and improvement. For supplementary material, please see the META Appendix and our OSF project at https://osf.io/6vhwn/?view_only=489498d3ac2d4703a17475fc6ca65dfa.

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

Designing Resource Allocation Tools to Promote Fair Allocation: Do Visualization and Information Framing Matter?

Studies on human decision-making focused on humanitarian aid have found that cognitive biases can hinder the fair allocation of resources. However, few HCI and Information Visualization studies have explored ways to overcome those cognitive biases. This work investigates whether the design of interactive resource allocation tools can help to promote allocation fairness. We specifically study the effect of presentation format (using text or visualization) and a specific framing strategy (showing resources allocated to groups or individuals). In our three crowdsourced experiments, we provided different tool designs to split money between two fictional programs that benefit two distinct communities. Our main finding indicates that individual-framed visualizations and text may be able to curb unfair allocations caused by group-framed designs. This work opens new perspectives that can motivate research on how interactive tools and visualizations can be engineered to combat cognitive biases that lead to inequitable decisions.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Cultural Windows: Towards a Workflow for Immersive Journeys into Global Living Spaces

"Cultural Windows" is a research initiative designed to enrich cross-cultural understanding through immersive extended reality (XR) experiences. This project proposes a workflow for deploying AR and VR platforms, allowing users to explore living spaces from diverse cultures and socio-economic statuses. The process involves 3D scanning of culturally significant objects, creating accurate models of living spaces, and integrating them into immersive systems to facilitate engagement with global living designs. Targeted at individuals curious about how people live in different parts of the world, the project aims to expand cross-cultural understanding and design perspectives, providing insights into the effectiveness of immersive technologies in cultural education. By detailing its conceptual framework, "Cultural Windows" aims to enhance comprehension and appreciation of global domestic aesthetics by comparing participants' perceptions with immersive, realistic representations of living spaces from different cultures. This can help bridge the gap between preconceived notions and the actual appearance and feel of these spaces.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Decoupling Judgment and Decision Making: A Tale of Two Tails

Is it true that if citizens understand hurricane probabilities, they will make more rational decisions for evacuation? Finding answers to such questions is not straightforward in the literature because the terms judgment and decision making are often used interchangeably. This terminology conflation leads to a lack of clarity on whether people make suboptimal decisions because of inaccurate judgments of information conveyed in visualizations or because they use alternative yet currently unknown heuristics. To decouple judgment from decision making, we review relevant concepts from the literature and present two preregistered experiments (N=601) to investigate if the task (judgment vs. decision making), the scenario (sports vs. humanitarian), and the visualization (quantile dotplots, density plots, probability bars) affect accuracy. While experiment 1 was inconclusive, we found evidence for a difference in experiment 2. Contrary to our expectations and previous research, which found decisions less accurate than their direct-equivalent judgments, our results pointed in the opposite direction. Our findings further revealed that decisions were less vulnerable to status-quo bias, suggesting decision makers may disfavor responses associated with inaction. We also found that both scenario and visualization types can influence peoples judgments and decisions. Although effect sizes are not large and results should be interpreted carefully, we conclude that judgments cannot be safely used as proxy tasks for decision making, and discuss implications for visualization research and beyond.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Information Visualization for Effective Altruism

Effective altruism is a movement whose goal it to use evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible. This movement is becoming influential, but effective altruists still lack tools to help them understand complex humanitarian trade-offs and make good decisions based on data. Visualization-the study of computer-supported, visual representations of data meant to support understanding, communication, and decision makingcan help alleviate this issue. Conversely, effective altruism provides a powerful thinking framework for visualization research that focuses on humanitarian applications.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Towards Immersive Humanitarian Visualizations

This paper introduces immersive humanitarian visualization as a promising research area in information visualization. Humanitarian visualizations are data visualizations designed to promote human welfare. This paper explains why immersive display technologies taken broadly (e.g, virtual reality, augmented reality, ambient displays and physical representations) open up a range of opportunities for humanitarian visualization. In particular, immersive displays offer ways to make remote and hidden human suffering more salient. They also offer ways to communicate quantitative facts together with qualitative information and visceral experiences, in order to provide a holistic understanding of humanitarian issues that could support more informed humanitarian decisions. But despite some promising preliminary work, immersive humanitarian visualization has not taken off as a research topic yet. The goal of this paper is to encourage, motivate, and inspire future research in this area.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Perception! Immersion! Empowerment! Superpowers as Inspiration for Visualization

We explore how the lens of fictional superpowers can help characterize how visualizations empower people and provide inspiration for new visualization systems. Researchers and practitioners often tout visualizations' ability to "make the invisible visible" and to "enhance cognitive abilities." Meanwhile superhero comics and other modern fiction often depict characters with similarly fantastic abilities that allow them to see and interpret the world in ways that transcend traditional human perception. We investigate the intersection of these domains, and show how the language of superpowers can be used to characterize existing visualization systems and suggest opportunities for new and empowering ones. We introduce two frameworks: The first characterizes seven underlying mechanisms that form the basis for a variety of visual superpowers portrayed in fiction. The second identifies seven ways in which visualization tools and interfaces can instill a sense of empowerment in the people who use them. Building on these observations, we illustrate a diverse set of "visualization superpowers" and highlight opportunities for the visualization community to create new systems and interactions that empower new experiences with data.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2016

Accounting for Availability Biases in Information Visualization

The availability heuristic is a strategy that people use to make quick decisions but often lead to systematic errors. We propose three ways that visualization could facilitate unbiased decision-making. First, visualizations can alter the way our memory stores the events for later recall, so as to improve users' long-term intuitions. Second, the known biases could lead to new visualization guidelines. Third, we suggest the design of decision-making tools that are inspired by heuristics, e.g. suggesting intuitive approximations, rather than target to present exhaustive comparisons of all possible outcomes, or automated solutions for choosing decisions.

cs.HC↗