IEEE VIS 2024 Content: Dark Mode or Light Mode? Exploring the Impact of Contrast Polarity on Visualization Performance Between Age Groups

Dark Mode or Light Mode? Exploring the Impact of Contrast Polarity on Visualization Performance Between Age Groups

Zack While - University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, United States

Ali Sarvghad - University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, United States

Room: Bayshore VI

2024-10-17T12:30:00Z GMT-0600 Change your timezone on the schedule page
2024-10-17T12:30:00Z
Exemplar figure, described by caption below
Two rows of data visualizations, each row consisting of 3 visualizations: a scatterplot, bar chart, and line chart, respectively. The top row uses positive contrast, also known as light mode, while the bottom row uses negative contrast, also known as dark mode.
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Keywords

people in late adulthood, GerontoVis, data visualization, contrast polarity

Abstract

This study examines the impact of positive and negative contrast polarities (i.e., light and dark modes) on the performance of younger adults and people in their late adulthood (PLA). In a crowdsourced study with 134 participants (69 below age 60, 66 aged 60 and above), we assessed their accuracy and time performing analysis tasks across three common visualization types (Bar, Line, Scatterplot) and two contrast polarities (positive and negative). We observed that, across both age groups, the polarity that led to better performance and the resulting amount of improvement varied on an individual basis, with each polarity benefiting comparable proportions of participants. However, the contrast polarity that led to better performance did not always match their preferred polarity. Additionally, we observed that the choice of contrast polarity can have an impact on time similar to that of the choice of visualization type, resulting in an average percent difference of around 36%. These findings indicate that, overall, the effects of contrast polarity on visual analysis performance do not noticeably change with age. Furthermore, they underscore the importance of making visualizations available in both contrast polarities to better-support a broad audience with differing needs. Supplementary materials for this work can be found at https://osf.io/539a4/.