Investigating differences in two visualisations from observer's fixations and saccades
Md Zakir Hossain, Tom Gedeon, Sabrina Caldwell, Leana Copeland, Richard Jones, Christopher W.K. Chow · Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference · 2018
Our long-term objective is to produce an experiment based methodology for comparing visualisations in challenging settings. We investigated observers' eye gaze fixations and saccades during their search for answers from two graph visualisations (radial and hierarchical) of public data. The data is a snapshot of the kinds of data used in compliance checking of the degree of compliance with corporate governance best practice. We asked six questions from 24 observers for each visualisation and found that observers were 80.6% and 81.3% correct for the radial and hierarchical visualisations respectively. This is the kind of challenging setting we aim to work in, where we expect no significant difference between the visualisations in the observers' correct response rates. The results show that the number of fixations can highly significantly differentiate between radial and hierarchical visualisations where observers' correct response rates cannot.