Five key types of accuracy in educational science visuals explained
Representational Fidelity in Didactic Visualization: Toward a Multidimensional Design Space
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Visuals used in teaching science and engineering often try to be accurate, but usually this accuracy is seen as just one thing, from simple to very realistic. The authors studied many examples and found that accuracy actually has five different parts: shape, movement, hints, setting, and how much you can interact with it. They checked how these parts work together and tested if designers find this way of thinking helpful. Their work helps people make better and clearer educational visuals by thinking about all these accuracy types separately.
representational fidelitydidactic visualizationmorphological fidelitydynamic fidelitycueing fidelitycontextual fidelityinteractive fidelitydesign spacescience educationvisualization design
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.