Choriented Maps: Visualizing SDG Data on Mobile Devices
This addresses visualization problems for users exploring geographic data on mobile devices, offering an incremental improvement over existing map types.
The paper tackled the challenge of distinguishing between many classes in geographic data visualizations by introducing choriented maps, which use color and orientation, and found they achieved comparable or better effectiveness and confidence scores than traditional methods like choropleth and graduated symbol maps in a study on SDG data.
Choropleth maps and graduated symbol maps are often used to visualize quantitative geographic data. However, as the number of classes grows, distinguishing between adjacent classes increasingly becomes challenging. To mitigate this issue, this work introduces two new visualization types: choriented maps (maps that use colour and orientation as variables to encode geographic information) and choriented mobile (an optimization of choriented maps for mobile devices). The maps were evaluated in a graphical perception study featuring the comparison of SDG (Sustainable Development Goal) data for several European countries. Choriented maps and choriented mobile visualizations resulted in comparable, sometimes better effectiveness and confidence scores than choropleth and graduated symbol maps. Choriented maps and choriented mobile visualizations also performed well regarding efficiency overall and performed worse only than graduated symbol maps. These results suggest that the use of colour and orientation as visual variables in combination can improve the selectivity of map symbols and user performance during the exploration of geographic data in some scenarios.