Evaluating Interactive Graphical Encodings for Data Visualization

User interfaces for data visualization often consist of two main components: control panels for user interaction and visual representation. A recent trend in visualization is directly embedding user interaction into the visual representations. For example, instead of using control panels to adjust visualization parameters, users can directly adjust basic graphical encodings (e.g., changing distances between points in a scatterplot) to perform similar parameterizations. However, enabling embedded interactions for data visualization requires a strong understanding of how user interactions influence the ability to accurately control and perceive graphical encodings. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of these graphical encodings when serving as the method for interaction. Our user study includes 12 interactive graphical encodings. We discuss the results in terms of task performance and interaction effectiveness metrics.