Evaluating Colour in Concept Diagrams

McGrath, Sean; Blake, Andrew; Stapleton, Gem; Touloumis, Anestis; Chapman, Peter; Jamnik, Mateja; Shams, Zohreh

Abstract

This paper is the first to establish the impact of colour on users' ability to interpret the informational content of concept diagrams, a logic designed for ontology engineering. Motivation comes from results for Euler diagrams, which form a fragment of concept diagrams: manipulating curve colours affects user performance. In particular, using distinct curve colours yields significant performance benefits in Euler diagrams. Naturally, one would expect to obtain similar empirical results for concept diagrams, since colour is a graphical feature to which we are perceptually sensitive. Thus, this paper sets out to test this expectation by conducting a crowdsourced empirical study involving 261 participants. Our study suggests that manipulating curve colours no longer yields significant performance differences in this syntactically richer logic. Consequently, when using colour to visually group syntactic elements with common semantic properties, we ask how different do the elements' shapes need to be in order for there to be significant performance benefits arising from using colours?

Citation

McGrath, S., Blake, A., Stapleton, G., Touloumis, A., Chapman, P., Jamnik, M., & Shams, Z. (2022). Evaluating Colour in Concept Diagrams. In Diagrammatic Representation and Inference: 13th International Conference, Diagrams 2022, Rome, Italy, September 14–16, 2022, Proceedings (168-184). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15146-0_14

• Conference Name: International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams
• Conference Location: Rome
• Start Date: Sep 11, 2022
• End Date: Sep 15, 2022
• Acceptance Date: Jun 7, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Sep 7, 2022
• Publication Date: 2022
• Deposit Date: Jun 16, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 8, 2023
• Publisher: Springer
• Pages: 168-184
• Series Title: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Series Number: 13462
• Book Title: Diagrammatic Representation and Inference: 13th International Conference, Diagrams 2022, Rome, Italy, September 14–16, 2022, Proceedings
• ISBN: 978-3-031-15145-3
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15146-0_14
• Keywords: concept diagrams, Euler diagrams, perception, colour
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2879532