Vibes on Demand: Adding Vibrotactile Encoding to Line Charts Shows Experiential Benefits Without Performance Costs

Abstract

Details on demand is a common design pattern in visualization design, especially useful when interacting with visually-saturated or small displays. Beyond visualization, another common approach for saturated displays is to incorporate other modalities, such as haptic feedback. While haptic rendering in visualization has primarily targeted accessibility needs, with haptics as a substitute for visual feedback, studies using haptics outside of a visualization context have shown value in experiential factors, such as increased confidence in ambiguous contexts and higher engagement. We explore vibrotactile feedback as a reinforcing information channel for communicating trends in details-on-demand tooltips on touchscreens. We identify preferred parameter configurations for our haptic encoding, informed by a study where participants identified parameter configurations that they perceived to most accurately reflect the dynamics of line charts appearing in tooltips. In a second study, we evaluated participant performance in a pairwise comparison task, finding that incorporating vibrotactile encoding improves involvement without affecting accuracy. We discuss the implications of these findings for future visualization design, and propose directions for applications and future studies.