Confidence intervals, standard error, and generalized error rates are
typically visualized with error bars - thin strokes that are superimposed
over the mean. This work present the results of crowd-sourced experiments
which illustrate that viewers misinterpret these encodings even at the most
basic level (where one would hope larger margins of error reduce the
confidence in judgments about means). We then present evaluations of three
alternate (or supplemental) visual encodings for the same task and show that
choice of visual encoding can result in viewers who make decisions which are
better informed by the margins of error.