What Makes You Think This Is a Map?
Patrick Cheong‐Iao Pang, Robert P. Biuk‐Aghai, Muye Yang · 2016
Maps have traditionally been used for representing the surface of the earth and for displaying geographical information. Apart from this obvious purpose, the metaphor of maps has been applied to other uses as well, such as information visualisation and novel user interfaces. Various methods exist for creating geographic map-like visualisations. Yet there is little understanding on how people perceive these graphical presentations as geographic maps, and how to make these information visualisations look like geographic maps. We attempt to find preliminary answers on these issues by conducting a user study with a series of map-like visualisations. In this paper, we report on the results of this study and reveal the factors that have an impact on the human perception of visualisations that are designed to resemble geographic maps. Based on this, we propose design suggestions for the future development of map-like visualisations.