The Effect of Narration on User Comprehension and Recall of Information Visualisations

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, there is limited work describing the effects of author-driven narratives in users' comprehension and memorability of visualisations in relation to interactive visualisations. Recommendations for author-driven visualisation stories are largely based on anecdotal reports or research from the arts, and not on studies in information visualisation. To investigate these issues, we carried out a 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.