The Effect of Graphical Formats on Computer-Based Idea Generation Performance

Purpose Since human brains catch images faster than texts or numbers, infographics has been widely used in business in the form of "information dashboard" to enhance the efficiency of decision-making. Groupware, however, has neglected the adoption and use of infographics, in particular, in the idea generation process. Given that an overall performance of groupware-based idea generation is no better than that of the (paper-and-pencil-based) Nominal Group Technique, Jung et al. (2010) adopted the notion of infographics in the form of performance feedback to solve the productivity paradox. With the consistent results, which demonstrate beneficial effects of infographics on performance enhancement, an interesting observation that groups with the bar chart treatment performed better than groups with the dot chart treatment was made. The main purpose of this study was to find if there were a performance consistency between the outcomes from the previous study and the outcomes from the current study. Design/methodology/approach In experiment 1, we employed the same system used in the previous study (i.e., Jung et al., 2010). As individuals' contributions accumulated, the mechanism visually displayed individuals' performances two-dimensionally in the form of a bar chart or a dot chart. Then, we compared the performance outcomes from this study to the outcomes from previous study (i.e., Jung et al., 2010). In experiment 2, we modified the performance graph to test the effect of "playfulness" on performance by converting dots to car images. Then, we compared the performance outcome from experiment 2 to the outcomes from experiment 1. Findings Just like our interesting (and unexpected) finding in Jung et al.'s study (2010), the outcome confirmed a consistent superior performance of a bar chart. This implies that a bar chart is a better choice when stimulating performance with a visual aid in the context of groupware-based idea generation. Although a bar chart was criticized in a way that errors of length-area judgments are 40 ~ 250% greater than those of positional judgments along a common scale, such illusion turned out to be facilitating upward performance comparison better. Regarding Experiment 2, the outcome showed that the revised-dot graph is as good as the bar graph in terms of quantity and quality score of ideas. We attribute the performance enhancement of the resized-dot to the interaction between the motivational characteristic and the situational characteristic of playfulness because individuals in the revised-dot graph treatment performed better than individuals in the dot graph treatment. Given the order of performance (Bar >= Revised Dot > Dot) that the revised-dot treatment performed the same as (or lower than) the bar treatment, an additional research is warranted to reach to a consistent outcome.