Understanding of Tabular Visualization

• Gives some indication of how tables are perceived but not experimentally based. Also gives indications of how tables are used and should be designed but not experimentally based.

  J. Bertin, “Semiologie Graphique”, 1967

• Perception of bar charts, pie charts, and tables for the task of comparing proportions of components and combinations of components. They found poor performance for tables compared with the two summary visualizations for such tasks. They did not find ordering to have a significant effect on the task performance.

  I. Spence and S. Lewandowsky, “Displaying proportions and percentages,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 61–77, 1991, doi: 10.1002/acp.2350050106.

• Survey paper of perception studies for visualizations including tabular visualizations.

  G. J. Quadri and P. Rosen, “A Survey of Perception-Based Visualization Studies by Task,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 28, no. 12, pp. 5026–5048, Dec. 2022, doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2021.3098240.

• Comparison of task performance on value retrieval, range, correlation, and a decision task comparing parallel coordinates, scatterplot matrix and tabular visualizations found that tables perform well for in terms of speed and accuracy for decision based tasks.

  E. Dimara, A. Bezerianos, and P. Dragicevic, “Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Evaluating Multidimensional Visualizations for Decision Support,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 749–759, Jan. 2018, doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2017.2745138.

• Comparison of Amar-Eagan-Stasko low level task performances for tables, bar charts, pie charts, scatterplots and line charts reporting user accuracy, speed and preferences found that tables perform well for retrieval and computation tasks compared to other basic charts.

  B. Saket, A. Endert, and Ç. Demiralp, “Task-Based Effectiveness of Basic Visualizations,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 25, no. 7, pp. 2505–2512, Jul. 2019, doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2018.2829750.

• Includes experiments comparing tables, bar tables, and bar charts for comparing ratio tasks. The findings show that tables promote unbiased reasoning and avoid problems of confirmation bias in comparison with bar charts by promoting the use of the ratio strategy.

  C. Xiong, E. Lee-Robbins, I. Zhang, A. Gaba, and S. Franconeri, “Reasoning Affordances with Tables and Bar Charts,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, pp. 1–13, 2022, doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2022.3232959.