Familiarity vs. Correctness: Arcs and Angles in Sunburst Charts
S. Songsakulkiat and P. Ruchikachorn, Familiarity vs. Correctness: Arcs and Angles in Sunburst Charts, PacificVis Posters, Tianjin, China, 2021.
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A Sunburst chart visualizes hierarchical data as concentric rings. Similar to a pie chart, a Sunburst chart may be read through arc lengths or sector angles, but its multilevel nature makes arc lengths across levels unreliable as a visual variable. In this study, we designed Sunburst chart variations to test whether they affect chart reading performance. We found that the participants used arc lengths to read chart values, confirming a previous study. Other factors in the experiment suggested that the values in focus should be placed in adjacent layers and in quadrant III and IV as the participants tended to correctly read data values through angles instead.