Let's Get Personal: Exploring the Design of Personalized Visualizations

Media outlets often publish visualizations that can be personalized based on users' demographics, such as location, race, and age. However, the design of such personalized visualizations remains under-explored. In this work, we contribute a design space analysis of 47 public-facing articles with personalized visualizations to understand how designers structure content, encourage exploration, and present insights. We find that articles often lack explicit exploration suggestions or instructions, data notices, and personalized visual insights. We then outline three trajectories for future research: (1) explore how users choose to personalize visualizations, (2) examine how exploration suggestions and examples impact user interaction, and (3) investigate how personalization influences user insights.

1 Introduction

In a world where online news platforms and blogs compete with social media outlets for user engagement, there is a pressing need to generate content that connects with users. Personalization, par-ticularly feed personalization (or tailoring content feeds to provide more relevant information), has been one of the many strategies employed to encourage user engagement [8]. More recently, how-ever, news outlets have explored another form of personalization, content personalization, that tailors an article's content based on user information [1], [8], [17]. This personalization may include injecting text with local statistics for a user's location [17] or personalizing a visualization to show data related to a user's age. Not only would this personalization provide more relevant experiences, but some prior work argues that it may even increase engagement [1], [8].