Incidental graphical perception: How marks and display time influence accuracy

Incidental visualizations are meant to be perceived at-a-glance, on-the-go, and during short exposure times, but are not seen on demand. Instead, they appear in people’s fields of view during an ongoing primary task. They differ from glanceable visualizations because the information is not received on demand, and they differ from ambient visualizations because the information is not continuously embedded in the environment. However, current graphical perception guidelines do not consider situations where information is presented at specific moments during brief exposure times without being the user’s primary focus. Therefore, we conducted a crowdsourced user study with 99 participants to understand how accurate people’s incidental graphical perception is. Each participant was tested on one of the three conditions: position of dots, length of lines, and angle of lines. We varied the number of elements for each combination and the display time. During the study, participants were asked to perform reproduction tasks, where they had to recreate a previously shown stimulus in each. Our results indicate that incidental graphical perception can be accurate when using position, length, and angles. Furthermore, we argue that incidental visualizations should be designed for low exposure times (between 300 and 1000 ms).