Communicative visualizations incorporating narratives and/or interactivity are commonplace. However, the relative importance of narratives versus interactivity in improving readers’ understanding is unclear. As narratives and interactivity are broad design strategies, for the purposes of our work we define more specific subsets of these two strategies: exploratory interactivity (interactivity which allows user exploration of the data) and explanatory narrative (textual messaging with an author prescribed sequence of steps). We designed visualizations which vary in the presence or absence of exploratory interactivity and explanatory narrative, presented them to Turkers, and measured recall of facts from the visualizations using a ten item True/False questionnaire.

We find aweak positive effect — an increase of ~10 percentage points, 95% CI: [6.1, 14.3] — from the presence of explanatory narratives, but likely little or no practical effect from exploratory interactivity (mean: 2.3 percentage points, 95%CI: [–1.4, 6.0]). We argue that explanatory narratives may better facilitate recall than exploratory interactivity in communicative visualizations. Given the expertise required to construct exploratory interactive visualizations, the associated costs (in terms of design time or personnel) may not be worth the likely small gain in reader understanding. We suggest that in contrast to visualization for data analysis (where exploratory interactivity is quite powerful), for communicative visualization, explanatory narrative and other forms of interactivity (e.g., active learning approaches) might represent better trade-offs in the design space.