Which device in your home uses the most electricity? Many people have a poor understanding of their domestic energy consumption. In this paper, we evaluated three data visualizations used to deliver feedback. These were: (1) an aggregated line graph – showing changes in total electricity consumption over time, (2) a disaggregated line graph – showing changes in electricity consumed over time but separated out at the appliance-level, and (3) an area-based visualization – showing the cumulative energy consumed by different appliances over a given time period. In an experiment, 65 participants used one of these three visualizations to make sense of the same pattern of domestic electricity data. Participants who used the area-based visualization gained a more accurate understanding of how much electricity different domestic appliances were using compared to participants who were shown time series data. These results suggest that the choice of data visualization will impact people's understanding from smart metering systems, and that appliance-wise disaggregation offers the most promising approach for visualizing domestic electricity consumption data.

您家中哪个设备消耗的电量最多？许多人对其国内能源消耗了解甚少。在本文中，我们评估了用于提供反馈的三种数据可视化。它们是：（1）折线图-显示总用电量随时间的变化；（2）折线图-显示用电量随时间的变化，但在设备级别分开；以及（3）区域基于可视化–显示给定时间段内不同设备所消耗的累积能量。在一个实验中，有65位参与者使用这三种可视化效果之一来理解相同的家庭用电数据模式。与显示时间序列数据的参与者相比，使用了基于区域的可视化的参与者更准确地了解了不同家用电器使用的电量。这些结果表明，数据可视化的选择将影响人们对智能电表系统的理解，并且以设备为单位的分类为可视化家庭用电量数据提供了最有前途的方法。