Experts’ Familiarity Versus Optimality of Visualization Design: How Familiarity Affects Perceived and Objective Task Performance

Visualization techniques are gaining increasing prominence across domains as a principal medium for sharing and communicating experts’ insights. A heuristic used by domain experts while choosing or designing a visualization is often their prior familiarity with an encoding choice or a visual representation. However, familiar visualizations and encodings within a domain are often in conflict with the optimality of visualization design, in terms of how well they support the data analysis or communication tasks. The use of the familiarity heuristic leads to a perceived cognitive ease in processing familiar representations of information and causes scientists to undermine the effect of visualization best practices. Recent studies have shown that this bias often results in a discrepancy between scientists’ perceived and actual performance quality. It has also been shown that in some cases, participatory design sessions and qualitative and quantitative user studies are able to mitigate the effects of such bias. In this chapter, we discuss the potential causes and effects of familiarity related biases with examples from recent studies and reflect on the associated research questions.