Representational fidelity split into five key types for better didactic visuals
Representational Fidelity in Didactic Visualization: Toward a Multidimensional Design Space
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
When making scientific or engineering visuals to teach ideas, people often think about how realistic the images are as one simple scale. The authors found this misses many details and introduced five different ways to think about how visuals represent information: shape, movement, highlighting, context, and user interaction. They checked this idea by looking at many examples and running design exercises with people. Their work helps designers make better teaching visuals by thinking about different types of realism separately.
What this means in practice
- •For instructional designers: Create more effective teaching visuals by using a detailed framework to choose what kinds of realism to emphasize for different learning goals.
- •For educational technology developers: Design interactive learning tools that balance shape, movement, and contextual cues systematically for clearer student comprehension in science and engineering.
Authors
Shehryar Saharan, Michele Oliver, Karen Gordon, Gaël McGill, Jodie Jenkinson
Abstract
Representational fidelity is routinely treated as a single abstract-realistic continuum, a simplification that limits how it is described and compared across research and design contexts. We introduce a multidimensional design space of representational fidelity for didactic visualization in science & engineering, inductively derived from a 175-item corpus spanning several disciplines, modalities, and instructional aims. The resulting design space specifies five dimensions: Morphological, Dynamic, Cueing, Contextual, and Interactive Fidelity, with seven sub-dimensions. We demonstrate the design space's descriptive power through successive rounds of expansion and refinement and analyze the corpus to reveal relationships among dimensions and implications for design and research. We further validate the design space through a pilot focus group in which participants applied the dimensions in an open-ended design exercise. Resulting sketches and verbal rationales informed a single-designer applied case study, offering preliminary evidence of the design space's generative potential as a structured aid to design exploration. Together, these contributions lay the groundwork for future research and more intentional design practice.