Why Shouldn't All Charts Be Scatter Plots? Beyond Precision-Driven Visualizations
This work addresses a foundational issue in information visualization for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories without introducing a new method.
The paper challenges the notion that scatter plots are always the best visualization method, arguing that this perspective oversimplifies visual variable effectiveness and calls for new approaches in visualization research, teaching, and evaluation.
A central concept in information visualization research and practice is the notion of visual variable effectiveness, or the perceptual precision at which values are decoded given visual channels of encoding. Formative work from Cleveland & McGill has shown that position along a common axis is the most effective visual variable for comparing individual values. One natural conclusion is that any chart that is not a dot plot or scatterplot is deficient and should be avoided. In this paper we refute a caricature of this "scatterplots only" argument as a way to call for new perspectives on how information visualization is researched, taught, and evaluated.