Leveraging Conscientiousness-Based Preferences in Information Visualization Design

Abstract

Recent research on information visualization has shown how individual differences such as personality mediate how users interact with visualization systems. Although there is a robust body of research on this relationship, these studies focus on a particular subset of personality constructs. Therefore, there are still personality traits with untapped potential that can provide new findings and inform the design of user-centered visualization systems. This study focuses on the conscientiousness personality trait, which measures a person’s preference for an organized approach to life over a spontaneous one. In particular, we believe that conscientiousness may regulate how one prefers graphical encodings and organization. We leverage design guidelines based on user preferences and conscientiousness levels to prototype different information visualization systems. We conducted a user testing phase to understand how these prototypes affect user task efficiency, task efficacy, perceived ease-of-use, perceived usefulness, and preference. Our findings show that conscientiousness levels lead to distinct user preferences, suggesting an interaction effect between conscientiousness and design guidelines in task efficiency. Additionally, individuals with low conscientiousness scores appear to be faster at completing tasks independently of the design guidelines. Moreover, individuals with high and low conscientiousness scores prefer a visualization specifically designed based on their preferences. Finally, the design guidelines lead to different perceived ease-of-use scores. Our study sheds new light on the relevance of personality as an adaptation technique in the design pipeline of visualization systems.