The Impact of a Narrative Design Strategy for Information Visualization on a Public Display

Public displays are increasingly deployed to make civic data easily and publicly consumable. While augmenting such public visualizations with a narrative design strategy could be promising to engage a lay audience, they might perform differently on public displays than on common online media because of the more context-sensitive environment. We therefore report on a comparative in-the-wild study of a public display that contrasts an identical public visualization with and without a narrative structure, and unravel how this affects the user engagement and insight creation process. Our findings indicate how a narrative strategy in relation to contextual aspects supports deeper, more personal reflection on data, connects authorship to the surrounding environment, and overcomes comprehension issues. We believe these results are useful for making public visualizations more effective, as well as understanding why and how lay users interact with and learn from narrative data visualization in general.