Effect of Color Palettes in Heatmaps Perception: a Study

Abstract

Heatmaps are a widely used technique in visualization. Unfortunately, they have not been investigated in depth and little is known about the best parameterizations so that they are properly interpreted. The effect of different palettes on our ability to read values is still unknown. To address this issue, we conducted a user study, in which we analyzed the effect of two commonly used color palettes, Blues and Viridis, on value estimation and value search. As a result, we provide some suggestions for what to expect from the heatmap configurations analyzed.