Rainbow Dash: Intuitiveness, Interpretability and Memorability of the Rainbow Color Scheme in Visualization

After demonstrating that rainbow colors are still commonly used in scientific publications, we comparatively evaluate the rainbow and sequential color schemes on choropleth and isarithmic maps in an empirical user study with 544 participants to examine if a) people intuitively associate order for the colors in these schemes, b) they can successfully conduct perceptual and semantic map reading and recall tasks with quantitative data where order may have implicit or explicit importance. We find that there is little to no agreement in ordering of rainbow colors while sequential colors are indeed intuitively ordered by the participants with a strong dark is more bias. Sequential colors facilitate most quantitative map reading tasks better than the rainbow colors, whereas rainbow colors competitively facilitate extracting specific values from a map, and may support hue recall better than sequential. We thus contribute to dark- versus light is more bias debate, demonstrate why and when rainbow colors may impair performance, and add further nuance to our understanding of this highly popular, yet highly criticized color scheme.

Automated summary

In this empirical study, we found that sequential color schemes are more suitable for quantitative map reading tasks in choropleth and isarithmic maps compared to rainbow color schemes. However, rainbow colors can still be competitive in extracting specific values from a map.