ViCo: A Metric for the Complexity of Information Visualizations

Information Visualization produces a visual representation of abstract data in order to facilitate a deeper level of understanding of the data under investigation. This paper introduces ViCo, a metric for assessing Information Visualization complexity. The proposed metric allows for the measurement of Information Visualization complexity with respect to tasks and users. The algorithm for developing such a metric for any chosen collection of visualizations is described in general and then applied to two examples for purposes of illustration.