Design Techniques to Offset Potential Costs in Configural Displays

Research on configural displays has indicated that they facilitate the extraction of high-level properties in a domain if the emergent features map appropriately to the critical data relationships. On the other hand, designing configural displays to offset the potential cost for the extraction of low-level data has proven to be more challenging. Several complementary design strategies (i.e., color-coding/layering/separation, tick marks/gridlines, bar graphs/extenders, and digital values) were applied to the same configural display and performance was compared in two experiments. In Exp. 1 observers had two displays (baseline, enhanced) and completed two types of probes (focused and integrated) with two probe methodologies (concurrent visual and retrospective memory). The enhanced display produced significantly faster and significantly more accurate responses for both focused and integrated probes when the probes were administered with the concurrent methodology. In Exp. 2 observers had 10 displays (versions with design strategies applied alone and in various combinations) and completed only focused probes using the concurrent methodology. The results indicate that both digital values and tick marks/gridlines were particularly effective in offsetting potential costs associated with configural displays. The implications for the design and evaluation of configural displays are discussed.