From Reality to Recognition: Evaluating Visualization Analogies for Novice Chart Comprehension

Authors: Oliver Huang, Patrick Lee, Carolina Nobre

EuroVis 2025 Education - Proceedings of the 27th Eurographics Conference on Visualization

Abstract

Novice learners often have difficulty learning new visualization types because they tend to interpret novel visualizations through the mental models of simpler charts they have previously encountered. Traditional visualization teaching methods, which usually rely on directly translating conceptual aspects of data into concrete data visualizations, often fail to attend to the needs of novice learners navigating this tension. To address this, we systematically explored how analogies can be used to help novices with chart comprehension. We introduced visualization analogies: visualizations that map data structures to real-world contexts to facilitate an intuitive understanding of novel chart types. We evaluated this pedagogical technique using a within-subject study N=128 where we taught 8 novel chart types with visualization analogies. Our findings show that visualization analogies improve visual analysis skills and help learners transfer their understanding to actual charts. They effectively introduce visual embellishments, cater to diverse learning preferences, and are preferred by novice learners over traditional chart visualizations. This study offers theoretical insights and practical tools to advance visualization education through analogical reasoning.

Visualization Analogies

Data Relationship

Data Scale

Data-binding type

Data Dimension

Analogy strategies