Naïve Cartography: How Intuitions about Display Configuration Can Hurt Performance

Map-making has traditionally been the domain of professional cartographers, but with the advent of interactive display systems, users now have the flexibility to create and configure their own digital maps and other visual displays. This flexibility can be beneficial only if users have good intuitions about which display configurations are effective or ineffective for different tasks. Here we examine people's intuitions about display effectiveness and whether these intuitions match the actual effectiveness of different displays. Surveys of undergraduate students and post-graduate meteorology students reveal that they consistently prefer enhanced displays, especially those that add animation and realism. These naïve intuitions contrast with the principles of cartography, which emphasize the importance of abstracting from the real world to create simple displays that make task-relevant information salient. Both a review of objective studies and a new study presented here support traditional principles of cartography and are inconsistent with naïve intuitions. We interpret these studies in relation to new theoretical notions of users’ folk fallacies about how perception works, and derive implications for the design of interactive display systems and education.