Visual literacy level metrics and custom pathways

[RWadeSchuette]

A great frustration in so many fields and especially in briefings for "decision makers", which may well include public officials, "voters" or "the public",  is that "They don't use the models and tools we worked so hard to provide!"   I'll suggest that one huge reason that even stories don't fully address is visual illiteracy.  In particular, unrealized or unrecognized or un-admitted illiteracy.

As shown by High School and College exams,  the majority of people in the USA, at least, are functionally illiterate when it comes to reading a chart, or graph, or map.  This is not an automatic skill and one that is not taught well in school.  This is way beyond what people "prefer".   It is somewhere between a root canal, public speaking, and solving a word problem in calculus -- in other words, there is a very strong avoidance factor.   

Given the "cancel culture" we now live in, and "imposter syndrome", there is a terror related to looking stupid in public or saying one stupid thing in public.  This doesn't go away with education -- in fact, I think it increases with education level, and with level of management / rank.   In my hospital we had to train MD's, especially senior ones, individually, because they refused group sessions in which they might "ask a stupid question" in view of their peers. 

A coworker was on the US cross-country orienteering team and she remarked that Europeans ridicule Americans for having no ability to even read a simple road map.

Another factor affecting ability to process complex information is stress level and responsibility.  Pilot's of F-16 fighters have autopilots which monitor the stress and overload level of the pilots and simplify the displays for overtaxed ( and possibly injured ) pilots.  So there is a dynamic component of this as well as a static one. Very bright people under high stress may have an effective IQ of 90 at that moment.

Measuring the "grade level" of  text which some Esri apps do is a good start, but it misses the point that ability to make sense from text is not the same thing as ability to make sense or gain insight from images or maps. There might be almost zero correlation.

The predictable response is that when we put visualized data in front of executives or public officials, let alone the public,  many will be frustrated, angry,  ignore it, and turn away from it,  possibly without even understanding their own reluctance or avoidance.  A majority of people will be baffled.   An important fraction of people will neither realize nor admit their issue while the majority continue uninformed by our best efforts.

Our work will fall on "deaf eyes".

I think it is very hard for people who just love visualizations to remember how impenetrable even a simple Y=mx + b graph is to most people,  let alone a mult-factor very busy visualization of 6 related factors.

 I saw an ArcGIS map recently that should have been important to about a million people in an urban area, and the statistics showed that 10,000 had viewed it.   On the one hand this is great, and on the other hand this is "not working".   Misinformation and disinformation in this climate will not be overcome by this amount of horsepower.  I don't say this to complain -- I say this to focus on the question of how to get ten or 100 times as many people actually finding the results "accessible" and something they share with their friends the same day.

The rules of "improv" say I should shut up here.  Let me at least suggest a few approaches, possibly both using AI behind the scenes.

(1)  find metrics or proxy metrics which can capture the visual complexity of a presentation and the visual comprehension ability of the user.    In many cases there is no way to "give exams" to the target audience, so this may need to be inferred by watching their keystrokes and mouse clicks and time spent on pages, etc.  AI can help do that sort of thing.

(2) Like the F-16 autopilot,  personalize and instantly dynamically adjust the complexity until the user wakes up and starts responding.  This will be different for each user, each session, possibly even each minute of a session.  The goal is to engage the user at a level they can relate to and respond to.

One of my children has special needs and the school psychologists said she had no attention span, or maybe 2-3 minutes.   I wrote a video game for her that kept her success at blasting enemy flying saucers at about 93%, sweet spot.   The first time she got on it she played for 2.5 hours without a break.

Some kind of feedback loop could be added to story telling, to mimic how a real parent or teacher telling a story would reflexively respond to blank looks or body language until the light came up behind the eyes.

(3)  Find out in advance how many minutes the viewer has to work with.  If it is 5 minutes,  they need a different path than if it is 2 hours.

If this subject belongs in a different group, please let me know!  I'm new here.

Wade