An Evaluation of Methods for Presentation of Graphic Multiple Trends—Experiment III

It was found that for the point-reading task, either type of display is acceptable, but for the comparing task, themultiple-line display is much superior to the multiple-graph display.

Abstract

The primary objective of this study was to determine the effect of multiple-line versus multiple-graph presentation of trend-type displays on operator performance. Four types of lines having low confusability were determined experimentally from a sample of twenty-five lines. The primary variable was single-graph, multiple-line presentation versus multiple-graph single-line presentation. Other variables included in this study were: number of lines, degree of confusion among lines, coding of lines, and two operator tasks: point-reading and comparing. It was found that for the point-reading task, either type of display is acceptable, but for the comparing task, the multiple-line display is much superior to the multiple-graph display. Moreover, the use of color coding for the graph lines tended to improve performance slightly.