Smile or Scowl? Looking at Infographic DesignThrough the Affective Lens

[1] Lan X ,  Shi Y ,  Zhang Y , et al. Smile or Scowl? Looking at Infographic Design Through the Affective Lens[J]. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2021, PP(99):1-1.

Abstract

Infographics are frequently promoted for their ability to communicate data to audiences affectively. To facilitate the creation
of affect-stirring infographics, it is important to characterize and understand people’s affective responses to infographics and derive
practical design guidelines for designers. To address these research questions, we first conducted two crowdsourcing studies to
identify 12 infographic-associated affective responses and collect user feedback explaining what triggered affective responses in
infographics. Then, by coding the user feedback, we present a taxonomy of design heuristics that exemplifies the affect-related design
factors in infographics. We evaluated the design heuristics with 15 designers. The results showed that our work supports assessing the
affective design in infographics and facilitates the ideation and creation of affective infographics.

INTRODUCTION

When designing infographics, designers often desire to
trigger affective responses from viewers, as affect (people’s
emotion, mood, or feeling) is a critical intelligence of human
beings that drives decision-making more intuitively and
swiftly than logic does

Although their role has been highlighted by the design
field for more than a decade [8], [9], [10], affective responses
have been rarely examined in the visualization community.
While prior research has recognized the importance of triggering affective responses in narrative visualization, data personification, and public art [11], [12], [13], [14], little is known about how to design visualization that elicits affective responses. In one case

------------从而引出自己研究的重要性

 However, there is as yet no comprehensive
and systematic study on understanding people’s affective
responses to visualization specifically through infographics.
We lack knowledge onwhataffective responses can be
triggered by infographics, and whythey occur, which are
important to design affect-laden infographics.

研究结果

. The results indicated that our design heuristics can support assessing affective design in infographicsand inspire the creation of infographics that elicit affective
responses. Our corpus as well as study materials can be
accessed at https://affectiveinfographics.idvxlab.com.

主要贡献

The major contributions of this work include:
• We identified 12 infographic-associated affects and
mapped the affects to infographics through two crowdsourcing studies. These findings contribute to understanding what affects can be elicited by infographics.
• We developed a taxonomy of design heuristics that characterizes the affect-related design factors in infographics
by analyzing user comments. The design heuristics systematically incorporate affective factors into visualization
design for the first time.
• We conducted a workshop with 15 designers. The results
of our workshop showed that the design heuristics can
support design ideation and evaluation, as well as increase the likelihood of creating affective infographics.

CONCLUSION

By conducting two crowdsourcing studies and analyzing user comments, this work identified 12 common infographic-associated affects and derived a taxonomy of
design heuristics that exemplify affect-related design factors
in infographics. This work takes the first step towards
understanding visualization design through the affective
lens. We claim that designing for affective experience is an important complement to traditional principles of visualization design as it is user experience-centered and crucially related to user engagement. We think incorporating affective
factors into visualization design will open up rich avenues
for future studies. We hope our work will inspire more research on affective visualization as well as user experiencecentered visualization design