Improving Engagement of Animated Visualization with Visual Foreshadowing
This addresses engagement issues for viewers of animated visualizations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing foreshadowing concepts from other domains.
The paper tackled the problem of viewer distraction in animated visualizations by introducing visual foreshadowing techniques, and a user study showed these techniques effectively improved engagement.
Animated visualization is becoming increasingly popular as a compelling way to illustrate changes in time series data. However, maintaining the viewer's focus throughout the entire animation is difficult because of its time-consuming nature. Viewers are likely to become bored and distracted during the ever-changing animated visualization. Informed by the role of foreshadowing that builds the expectation in film and literature, we introduce visual foreshadowing to improve the engagement of animated visualizations. In specific, we propose designs of visual foreshadowing that engage the audience while watching the animation. To demonstrate our approach, we built a proof-of-concept animated visualization authoring tool that incorporates visual foreshadowing techniques with various styles. Our user study indicates the effectiveness of our foreshadowing techniques on improving engagement for animated visualization.