Impact of incidental visualizations on primary tasks

Incidental visualizations are meant to be seen at-a-glance, on-the-go, and during short exposure times. They will always appear side-by-side with an ongoing primary task while providing ancillary information relevant to those tasks. They differ from glanceable visualizations because looking at them is never their major focus, and they differ from ambient visualizations because they are not embedded in the environment, but appear when needed. However, unlike glanceable and ambient visualizations that have been studied in the past, incidental visualizations have yet to be explored in-depth. In particular, it is still not clear what is their impact on the users’ performance of primary tasks. Therefore, we conducted an empirical online between-subjects user study where participants had to play a maze game as their primary task. Their goal was to complete several mazes as quickly as possible to maximize their score. This game was chosen to be a cognitively demanding task, bound to be significantly affected if incidental visualizations have a meaningful impact. At the same time, they had to answer a question that appeared while playing, regarding the path followed so far. Then, for half the participants, an incidental visualization was shown for a short period while playing, containing information useful for answering the question. We analyzed various metrics to understand how the maze performance was impacted by the incidental visualization. Additionally, we aimed to understand if working memory would influence how the maze was played and how visualizations were perceived. We concluded that incidental visualizations of the type used in this study do not disrupt people while they played the maze as their primary task. Furthermore, our results strongly suggested that the information conveyed by the visualization improved their performance in answering the question. Finally, working memory had no impact on the participants’ results.