1

Which of the following is easier to understand the volume?

I'm looking for a congitive research which supports my assumptions that aggregation. Update - Assume we are talking on the number of hours and each bar represents a shift in a day. Red means more than 100% required hours per day, Grey means about 80% of hours per day, Etc.... White means no shift on that day.

enter image description here

is easier than dispersed

enter image description here

Improve this question
  • 1
    For me there is not enough information to create a useful answer. I do not understand, what the different symbols and colours represent at all. What do the red blocks mean? Why do the red blocks in the second picture have a blue border? Does "darker grey" mean more orders than "lighter grey"? How are the orders aggregated in the first picture (since it has no explaining text)? Could you elaborate a bit more about the context what is happening? – hamena314 Jan 6 '20 at 9:43
1

In effect, you're asking if a stacked horizontal bar chart (1st), where you've sorted the days of each individual week by shift %, is easier to read totals (volume) from than a fairly coarse scatterplot / matrix (2nd)?

The immediate answer is yes as that is what bar charts, stacked or unstacked, are designed to do - use one property - length - to show quantity rather than have the user add up individual elements and store the intermediate results in their head for comparison.

I don't know of any experiments that have compared the two directly, but I do know that matrix representations of networks often allow themselves to be sorted by the properties of individual rows/columns to make that particular subset of data (and it's relationship to other rows/columns - which isn't the case in yours as all rows are sorted) easier to see.

Improve this answer

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.