research-article

Showing Flow: Comparing Usability of Chord and Sankey Diagrams

Authors:

Aristides Mairena,

Venkat BandiAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Article No.: 825, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581119

Published: 19 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Chord and Sankey diagrams are two common techniques for visualizing flows. Chord diagrams use a radial layout with a single circular axis, and Sankey diagrams use a left-to-right layout with two vertical axes. Previous work suggests both strengths and weaknesses of the radial approach, but little is known about the usability and interpretability of these two layout styles for showing flow. We carried out a study where participants answered questions using equivalent Chord and Sankey diagrams. We measured completion time, errors, perceived effort, and preference. Our results show that participants took substantially longer to answer questions with Chord diagrams and made more errors; participants also rated Chord as requiring more effort, and strongly preferred Sankey diagrams. Our study identifies and explains limitations of the popular Chord layout, provides new understanding about radial vs. linear layouts that can help guide visualization designers, and identifies possible design improvements for both visualization types.

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Wang KHe SWang WYu JLiu YYu L(2024)CHORDination: Evaluating Visual Design Choices in Chord Diagrams for Network DataProceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction10.1145/3678698.3678707(1-8)Online publication date: 11-Dec-2024
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Index Terms

Showing Flow: Comparing Usability of Chord and Sankey Diagrams
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2023

14911 pages

ISBN:9781450394215

DOI:10.1145/3544548

Editors:
Albrecht Schmidt
LMU Munich, Germany60028717
,
Kaisa Väänänen
Tampere University, Finland60011170
,
Tesh Goyal
Google Research, USA60006191
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Per Ola Kristensson
University of Cambridge, UK60031101
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Anicia Peters
University of Namibia, Namibia60072704
,
Stefanie Mueller
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA60022195
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Julie R. Williamson
University of Glasgow, UK60001490
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Max L. Wilson
University of Nottingham, UK60015138

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Published: 19 April 2023

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.3390/digital4040041
Wang KHe SWang WYu JLiu YYu L(2024)CHORDination: Evaluating Visual Design Choices in Chord Diagrams for Network DataProceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction10.1145/3678698.3678707(1-8)Online publication date: 11-Dec-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3678698.3678707
Lu YLi JCui ZHu JLin YLuo SCai JKankanhalli MPrabhakaran BBoll SSubramanian RZheng LSingh VCesar PXie LXu D(2024)Designing Spatial Visualization and Interactions of Immersive Sankey Diagram in Virtual RealityProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia10.1145/3664647.3681460(98-107)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3664647.3681460
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