Attractive Visualization Influences the Perceived Quality of the Living Environment

An experiment was conducted with a Google Earth application which presents current and future land use in the Netherlands. Three visualization techniques representing future land use were compared: abstract colored surfaces, icons, and 3D-objects. None of the visualizations show a significant improvement of the accuracy of the information transfer or of the speed of the task performance in this experiment. The version with 3D-objects was appreciated most, and elicited more positive judgments on qualitative aspects of the perceived environment, although the visualization contained the same information as the other two conditions. This demonstrates the influence of the representation on the content, which should be considered in the design of visualizations for strategic government policy, as well as other purposes.