Sketchy Rendering to Aid the Recollection of Regular Visualizations

Abstract

Some visualizations have a more regular visual appearance than others. For example, while stream graphs or force-directed network layouts feature a unique, almost organic 'look and feel', matrices or unit treemaps can become rather bland, grid-like visualizations in which one data item is hard to tell apart from the next. In this paper, we investigate the use of sketchy rendering for such grid-like visualizations to give them a slightly more unique 'look and feel' themselves. We evaluate our approach in a lab study (N = 16) where participants were asked to re-find a given grid cell in regular and sketchy grids. We find that users who make conscious use of the sketchy features can benefit from certain forms of sketchy rendering in terms of task completion times.