Supporting Cognition in the Face of Political Data and Discourse: A Mental Models Perspective on Designing Information Visualization Systems

Research into the use of information visualizations (InfoVis) covers various areas, i.e. how users perceive, interact with, or make sense of abstract data through the use of visual interfaces. With regard to more complex topics in the context of political communication, the question shifts to: How do users organize their internal representations gained from multiple perspectives on a global level? And which design recommendations could be derived for external representations - especially for InfoVis interfaces with multiple views? In this paper we discuss the theory of mental models and its consequences for the design of InfoVis interfaces. Especially for multidimensional data, it is a challenge to design accessible and conceptually consistent InfoVis interfaces to support the local and global coherence of the recipients' mental models. In this paper we exemplarily show how different design features can accomplish this in the field of political communication and its complex data.