IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2020 Jan;26(1):1033-1042. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2019.2934784. Epub 2019 Aug 20.
Radial charts are generally considered less effective than linear charts. Perhaps the only exception is in visualizing periodical time-dependent data, which is believed to be naturally supported by the radial layout. It has been demonstrated that the drawbacks of radial charts outweigh the benefits of this natural mapping. Visualization of daily patterns, as a special case, has not been systematically evaluated using radial charts. In contrast to yearly or weekly recurrent trends, the analysis of daily patterns on a radial chart may benefit from our trained skill on reading radial clocks that are ubiquitous in our culture. In a crowd-sourced experiment with 92 non-expert users, we evaluated the accuracy, efficiency, and subjective ratings of radial and linear charts for visualizing daily traffic accident patterns. We systematically compared juxtaposed 12-hours variants and single 24-hours variants for both layouts in four low-level tasks and one high-level interpretation task. Our results show that over all tasks, the most elementary 24-hours linear bar chart is most accurate and efficient and is also preferred by the users. This provides strong evidence for the use of linear layouts - even for visualizing periodical daily patterns.
环形图通常被认为不如线性图有效。也许唯一的例外是在可视化周期性的时间依赖数据时，这种数据被认为是自然支持环形布局的。已经证明，环形图的缺点超过了这种自然映射的好处。作为一个特殊情况，对每日模式的可视化尚未使用环形图进行系统评估。与每年或每周的周期性趋势相比，在环形图上分析每日模式可能受益于我们在阅读我们文化中无处不在的环形时钟方面的训练技能。在一项由 92 名非专业用户参与的众包实验中，我们评估了环形图和线性图在可视化日常交通事故模式方面的准确性、效率和主观评价。我们系统地比较了两种布局的并排 12 小时变体和单个 24 小时变体，在四个低级任务和一个高级解释任务中进行比较。我们的结果表明，在所有任务中，最基本的 24 小时线性条形图是最准确和高效的，也是用户最喜爱的。这为使用线性布局提供了有力的证据，即使是用于可视化周期性的日常模式。
