How are people rated on visualizations? Read the article and find out how respondents rated the visualization with and without people.

For the study, we used 4 photos of the same building with different numbers of people: from the largest number of people playing a prominent role to smaller and smaller people in the background to no people at all (to test the reliability of the study, we took two survey samples – 8 photos in total). We asked groups of 400 people what they thought of the following photos. We asked them to rate each of them on a scale of 1 to 5.

I will now give you the results:

The visualizations with no or few people, in the background, are rated best. The lowest scores were given to visualizations in which people were the foreground characters.