The interplay between text and visualization is gaining importance for media where traditional text is enriched by visual elements to improve readability and emphasize facts. In two controlled eye-tracking experiments (N = 12), we approach answers to the question: How do visualization techniques influence reading behavior? We compare plain text to that marked with highlights, icons, and word-sized data visualizations. We assess quantitative metrics (eye movement, completion time, error rate) and subjective feedback (personal preference and ratings). The results indicate that visualization techniques, especially in the first experiment, show promising trends for improved reading behavior. The results also show the need for further research to make reading more effective and inform suggestions for future studies.

Despite the availability of hotel booking platforms with customer reviews, selecting the best hotel or accommodation can still be difficult. This is partly because it is hard to directly contrast multiple shortlisted hotels. We propose a new visual interface, called ViSCitR, that goes beyond existing solutions in visually comparing ratings and personalizing the evaluation based on individual priorities. Targeted at a broad audience, it integrates several dimensions of comparison into a highly interactive document. The document contrasts the hotels visually and textually from different perspectives, including (i) a geographic perspective with points of interest, (ii) a comparison of ratings across different categories, (iii) rating changes over time, and (iv) summaries of the most noted positive and negative points from the review texts. The interface is accompanied by a sidebar for personalization, which supports selecting relevant points of interest and setting priorities. Changing these adapts the visual comparison across all interface sections to match the user’s preferences. A qualitative evaluation with potential hotel customers showed that the personalized visual comparison is valuable for all users, while the advanced features of the interface are leveraged to different extents.

When visualizations are used to augment text, geographical information on a map, or on mobile devices, there often is not enough space to show complex data with approaches like juxtaposed visualizations or coordinated views. To alleviate this issue, we propose the use of animated transitions between several small-scale visualizations. We discuss design considerations for animated transitions in small-scale visualizations. We further present the results of a study on the effectiveness of those animated transitions in conveying information and attribute relations, and the mental load of following the animated transitions.

The recently active research area of black-box complexity revealed that for many optimization problems the best possible black-box optimization algorithm is significantly faster than all known evolutionary approaches. While it is not to be expected that a general-purpose heuristic competes with a problem-tailored algorithm, it still makes sense to look for the reasons for this discrepancy.