Personality as a predictor of user strategy: How locus of control affects search strategies on tree visualizations

Individual differences matter. While this has been the theme for many recent works in the Visualization and HCI commu-nities, the mystery of how to develop personalized visualiza-tions remains. This is largely because very little is known about how users actually use visualizations to solve problems and even less is known about how individual differences af-fect these problem-solving strategies. In this paper, we pro-vide evidence that strategies are indeed influenced by indi-vidual differences. We demonstrate how the personality trait locus of control impacts strategies on hierarchical visualiza-tions, and we introduce design recommendations for person-alized visualizations. Author Keywords visualization; individual differences; strategy; personality; locus of contro