Best Paper Award

We present an analysis of the representation of gender as a data dimension in data visualizations and propose a set of considerations around visual variables and annotations for gender-related data. Gender is a common demographic dimension of data collected from study or survey participants, passengers, or customers, as well as across academic studies, especially in certain disciplines like sociology. Our work contributes to multiple ongoing discussions on the ethical implications of data visualizations. By choosing specific data, visual variables, and text labels, visualization designers may, inadvertently or not, perpetuate stereotypes and biases. Here, our goal is to start an evolving discussion on how to represent data on gender in data visualizations and raise awareness of the subtleties of choosing visual variables and words in gender visualizations. In order to ground this discussion, we collected and coded gender visualizations and their captions from five different scientific communities (Biology, Politics, Social Studies, Visualisation, and Human-Computer Interaction), in addition to images from Tableau Public and the Information Is Beautiful awards showcase. Overall we found that representation types are community-specific, color hue is the dominant visual channel for gender data, and nonconforming gender is under-represented. We end our paper with a discussion of considerations for gender visualization derived from our coding and the literature and recommendations for large data collection bodies. A free copy of this paper and all supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/v9ams/.

The design of immersive interaction for mixed reality based on head-mounted displays (HMDs), hereafter referred to as Mixed Reality (MR), is still a tedious task which can hinder the advent of such devices. Indeed, the effects of the interface design on task performance are difficult to anticipate during the design phase: the spatial layout of virtual objects and the interaction techniques used to select those objects can have an impact on task completion time. Besides, testing such interfaces with users in controlled experiments requires considerable time and efforts. To overcome this problem, predictive models, such as the Keystroke-Level Model (KLM), can be used to predict the time required to complete an interactive task at an early stage of the design process. However, so far these models have not been properly extended to address the specific interaction techniques of MR environments. In this paper we propose an extension of the KLM model to interaction performed in MR. First, we propose new operators and experimentally determine the unit times for each of them with a HoloLens v1. Then, we perform experiments based on realistic interaction scenarios to consolidate our model. These experiments confirm the validity of our extension of KLM to predict interaction time in mixed reality environments..