Exploring the Effect of User Characteristics in Word Cloud Visualizations

Word clouds are very popular for visually summarizing texts. While word clouds usually show the frequency of words using font size, recent studies have explored other possible design elements. However, there is still a gap in terms of understanding how individual differences among users may impact their performance. This thesis aims to bridge this gap by answering two key research questions: What user characteristics are impacted by different variations of word clouds, and how word clouds could be adapted to different user characteristics. To answer these questions, we ran a user study where participants performed perceptual speed and verbal working memory tests followed by 36 trials of the magnitude judgement task for word clouds. Results showed that user characteristics like perceptual speed can significantly impact the performance of users. These results can be useful in the future to provide personalized word clouds that are suitable for people with different user characteristics.