Studying Color Blending for Visualizing Social Artifacts

Abstract

Given the tools and applications that are available today, we often communicate at any time and place, generating high volumes of social personal information. Visually representing such data may enable us to navigate and manage it in an effective manner. Color, due to its effectiveness in labeling and categorizing information, may highlight relevant data and further alleviate cognitive load associated with information interpretation. We have studied the use of color blending for representing social artifacts. In this paper we present a user study which we have performed to understand whether humans associate particular colors with different social artifacts. It has allowed us to understand which colors humans associate with contacts and conversation topics regarding either send and received messages, as well as volume and variety. Results have enabled us to derive a set of design implications on how to use color blending to represent social facets when visualizing social personal information.