An Instrument for Evaluating Uncertainty Visualization Techniques

Today's data visualization tools offer few capabilities and no representational standards for conveying uncertainty. Our aim is to remedy this by creating a visual vocabulary for uncertainty in data. However, we must first develop an extensible methodology for validating the effectiveness of uncertainty visualization techniques. In this paper we describe a test instrument we have developed to collect empirical data concerning four measures - accuracy, response time, reported confidence, and cognitive load - that can be used to evaluate techniques for visualizing data with uncertainty.