Comparison of Circle and Dodecagon Clock Designs for Visualizing 24-Hour Cyclical Data

Radial visualization is an important technique to depict serial periodic data. Circle clock design is intuitive to encode 24-hour cyclical data. However, the biggest limitation of the design is the accuracy of reading time points on circle. Dodecagon is another way to represent time series data. We empirically evaluated the effectiveness of circle and dodecagon clock design in perceiving specific points in time. A post-testing interview was also conducted to understand participants’ strategies to read the times. Results show that dodecagon is more accurate than circle in terms of reading time points. Dodecagon was voted as a powerful approach to read the time points and circle was regarded as a better beautiful visualization method.