"I Came Across a Junk": Understanding Design Flaws of Data Visualization from the Public's Perspective

The visualization community has a rich history of reflecting upon flaws of visualization design, and research in this direction has remained lively until now. However, three main gaps still exist. First, most existing work characterizes design flaws from the perspective of researchers rather than the perspective of general users. Second, little work has been done to infer why these design flaws occur. Third, due to problems such as unclear terminology and ambiguous research scope, a better framework that systematically outlines various design flaws and helps distinguish different types of flaws is desired. To address the above gaps, this work investigated visualization design flaws through the lens of the public, constructed a framework to summarize and categorize the identified flaws, and explored why these flaws occur. Specifically, we analyzed 2227 flawed data visualizations collected from an online gallery and derived a design task-associated taxonomy containing 76 specific design flaws. These flaws were further classified into three high-level categories (i.e., misinformation, uninformativeness, unsociableness) and ten subcategories (e.g., inaccuracy, unfairness, ambiguity). Next, we organized five focus groups to explore why these design flaws occur and identified seven causes of the flaws. Finally, we proposed a set of reflections and implications arising from the research.