Information visualisation researchers have posited that author-driven narratives will allow information to be conveyed efficiently and argue for the adoption of storytelling techniques in information visualisation. However, limited work has been done to date to concretely examine the effects of author-driven narratives in users’ comprehension and memorability of visualisations, and their associated benefits and limitations in relation to interactive visualisations (devoid of author narratives). Recommendations for author-driven visualisation stories are largely based on anecdotal reports and/or research from journalism, and not on factual user studies in information visualisation. To investigate these issues, we carried out a confirmatory user study that compared purely author-driven narratives with interactive visualisations devoid of author narratives, in terms of comprehension and short-term and long-term memorability. We found that the presence of narration in author-driven stories significantly aided the understanding of information but had no significant effect on the long-term recall of information from visualisations.

信息可视化研究人员认为，作者驱动的叙述将允许有效地传达信息，并主张在信息可视化中采用故事讲述技术。但是，迄今为止，为完成具体工作，作者审查叙事在用户对视觉化理解和记忆方面的作用，以及与交互式视觉化有关的益处和局限性（没有作者叙事）仅作了有限的工作。对作者驱动的可视化故事的建议主要基于轶事报道和/或新闻业的研究，而不是基于信息可视化中的事实用户研究。为了调查这些问题，我们进行了验证性用户研究，从理解力，短期和长期记忆力的角度，将纯作者驱动的叙述与没有作者叙述的交互式可视化进行了比较。我们发现，在作者驱动的故事中存在叙述可以极大地帮助理解信息，但对视觉化信息的长期召回没有显着影响。