Interpreting the Effect of Embellishment on Chart Visualizations

Infographics range from minimalism that aims to convey the raw data to elaborately decorated, or embellished, graphics that aim to engage readers by telling a story. Several studies have shown evidence to negative, but also positive, effects on embellishments. We conducted a set of experiments to gauge more precisely how embellishments affect how people relate to infographics and make sense of the conveyed story. By analyzing questionnaires, interviews, and eye-tracking data simplified by bundling, we show that, within bounds, embellishments have a positive effect on how users get engaged in understanding an infographic, with very limited downside. To our knowledge, our work is the first that fuses the aforementioned three information sources to understand infographics. Our findings can help to design more fine-grained studies to quantify the effects of embellishments and also to design infographics that effectively use the embellishments’ positive aspects identified. I think the contribution does not appear well in the abstract. It’s not just that the visual embellishments are positive. We show a methodology that allows us to see what these effects are (in addition to engagement, memorization and recall) at several levels (scales, interviews, eye tracking) which are therefore physiological and emotional. We could include this idea in the abstract?