Practice improves performance with uncertainty visualization tasks.

Authors

Benjamin T Files (U.S. DEVCOM Army Research Lab), Laura Marusich (U.S. DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory), Mark S. Dennison (U.S. DEVCOM Army Research Lab)

Keywords

Uncertainty visualization, practice, evaluation, learning

Abstract

Uncertainty visualization is an important tool for helping people make decisions based on estimates, predictions, and other sources of uncertain information. Designing and evaluating the extent to which different visualizations support optimal decision-making is an ongoing effort. In this short paper, we review evidence that purposeful practice with a visualization can substantially improve task performance, and that the rank ordering of task performance using visualizations can change before and after practice. Providing opportunities for practice might not always be practical in every application, but during evaluation it can be helpful to characterize how performance changes with practice to provide a fuller understanding of performance attributable to the visualization used.