Evaluating Colour in Concept Diagrams

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

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-15146-0_14

Evaluating Colour in Concept Diagrams

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

School of Arch, Tech and Eng

Research output: Contribution to conference › Paper › peer-review

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?

Original language	English
Pages	168-184
Number of pages	17
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15146-0_14
Publication status	Published - 16 Sept 2022
Event	Diagrams 2022: 13th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams - Rome, Italy Duration: 13 Sept 2022 → 17 Sept 2022 http://www.diagrams-conference.org/2022/

Conference

Conference	Diagrams 2022
Country/Territory	Italy
City	Rome
Period	13/09/22 → 17/09/22
Internet address	http://www.diagrams-conference.org/2022/

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research was partially funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (RPG-2016–082) for the project entitled Accessible Reasoning with Diagrams. Thanks to Eisa Alharbi for supplying experimental materials, associated with [2], on which some of our materials were based.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Keywords

concept diagrams
Euler diagrams
perception
colour

Access to Document

10.1007/978-3-031-15146-0_14

McGrathMainD2K22FINALAccepted author manuscript, 619 KBLicence: Other

Cite this

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Evaluating Colour in Concept Diagrams

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Keywords

Access to Document

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