Single complex glyphs versus multiple simple glyphs

Designers of information visualization systems have the choice to present information in a single integrated view or in multiple views. In practice, there is a continuum between the two strategies and designers must decide how much of each strategy to apply. Although high-level design guidelines (heuristics) are available, there are few low-level perceptual design guidelines for making this decision. We performed a controlled experiment with one, two, and four views to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these strategies on target detection and trend finding tasks in the context of multidimensional glyphs overlaid onto geographic maps. Results from the target detection tasks suggest that visual encoding is a more important factor when detecting a single attribute than the number of views. Additionally, for detecting two attributes, the trend indicates that reusing the most perceptually salient visual feature in multiple views provides faster performance than an integrated view that must map one of the attributes to a less salient feature.