Tell don’t just show: Narratives improve insight more than interactivity in communicative visualizations

Abstract

Communicative visualizations incorporating narratives and/or interactivity are increasingly commonplace. However, the relative importance of narrative versus interactivity in improving readers’ understanding is unclear. We designed visualizations which vary in presence of interactivity (static or interactive) and narrative (non-narrative or narrative), presented them to Turkers, and measured recall using an 11 item True/False questionnaire. We find a weak positive effect on recall—an increase of~8.4 percentage points (95% CI: [4.5, 12.7])—from the presence of narratives, but little or no effect from interactivity (95%CI: [-1.1, 5.1]). We argue that narratives can better facilitate insight generation for viewers of communicative visualizations, but that interactivity may not. We discuss implications for the broader definition of information visualization itself:contrary to well-known existing definitions, we question whether inter-activity is a necessary component of any information visualization, rather than a subordinate component that is useful if and when a design calls for it.