Speaker: Michaela Tuscher
As static visualizations like diagrams, maps, charts, or drawings become increasingly important in everyday life, it is crucial to find out how helpful they are. We are especially interested in how visual content performs compared to text. The content of this master's thesis was about a study where we compared the information intake of visual representations versus text only. We wanted to find out if visualizations or texts are processed faster by humans and which one is better understandable. We measured processing times, accuracy, and error rates when interpreting either texts or visualizations about different topics. We can deduce from the results that visualization processing times are faster. Still, the error rates for both modalities are pretty similar. It can further be shown that specific visualizations are more problematic than others.