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Stress in Graph Drawings: Perception, Preference, and Performance

Authors Gavin J. Mooney , Jacob Miller , Michael Wybrow , Stephen Kobourov , Helen C. Purchase

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LIPIcs.GD.2025.38.pdf
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ACM Subject Classification
  • Human-centered computing → Graph drawings
Keywords
  • Graph Drawing
  • Graph Drawing Metrics
  • Stress
  • Visual Perception
  • User Study

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Abstract

Stress in a graph drawing has been a popular layout principle for more than two decades. Low stress drawings exhibit the property that the geometric distances between all pairs of nodes correlate with the shortest paths between them. The assumption has always been that low stress drawings are "nicer" and better support human perception and comprehension than high stress drawings. In this paper, we put these assumptions to the test. We use a normalised scale-independent and rotation-independent metric for stress; this is necessary to ensure strict controls on our experimental stimuli. We report on three experiments, exploring human perception of stress, preference for stress, and the effect of stress on a graph performance task. We conclude that people can see stress in a graph drawing, that they prefer low stress drawings, and that their performance in a shortest path task improves as stress decreases - thus empirically confirming long-standing assumptions.

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Gavin J. Mooney, Jacob Miller, Michael Wybrow, Stephen Kobourov, and Helen C. Purchase. Stress in Graph Drawings: Perception, Preference, and Performance. In 33rd International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 357, pp. 38:1-38:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.GD.2025.38

Author Details

Gavin J. Mooney
  • Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Jacob Miller
  • Technical University of Munich, Heilbronn, Germany
Michael Wybrow
  • Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Stephen Kobourov
  • Technical University of Munich, Heilbronn, Germany
Helen C. Purchase
  • Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

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