When people browse online news, small thumbnail images accompanying links to articles attract their attention and help them to decide which articles to read. As an increasing proportion of online news can be construed as data journalism, we have witnessed a corresponding increase in the incorporation of visualization in article thumbnails. However, there is little research to support alternative design choices for visualization thumbnails, which include resizing, cropping, simplifying, and embellishing charts appearing within the body of the associated article. We therefore sought to better understand these design choices and determine what makes a visualization thumbnail inviting and interpretable. This paper presents our findings from a survey of visualization thumbnails collected online and from conversations with data journalists and news graphics designers. Our study reveals that there exists an uncharted design space, one that is in need of further empirical study. Our work can thus be seen as a first step toward providing structured guidance on how to design thumbnails for data stories.
When browsing unfamiliar content, such as in the case of online news reading, thumbnails must compete for the reader's attention with one another and with other content. We therefore turn to other prior research examining specific aspects of thumbnail design. Several factors appear to impact how thumbnails draw attention and their ultimate utility, such as thumbnail size and the inclusion of text within the thumbnail. @cite_7 studied thumbnail size, concluding that the optimal thumbnail size depends on the task they are intended to support. For instance, they posit that a thumbnail should be larger than 96x96 pixels in order to trigger recognition among those revisiting a page containing multiple thumbnails.
@cite_7
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The selectable lists of pages offered by Web browsers’ history and bookmark facilities ostensibly make it easier for people to return to previously visited pages. These lists show the pages as abstractions, typically as truncated titles and URLs, and more rarely as small thumbnail images. Yet we have little knowledge of how recognisable these representations really are. Consequently, we carried out a study that compared the recognisability of thumbnails between various image sizes, and of titles and URLs between various string sizes. Our results quantify the trade-off between the size of these representations and their recognisability. These findings directly contribute to how history and bookmark lists should be designed.