Designers of information visualization systems have
the choice to present information in a single integrated view or in
multiple views. In practice, there is a continuum between the two
strategies and designers must decide how much of each strategy to
apply. Although high-level design guidelines (heuristics) are
available, there are few low-level perceptual design guidelines for
making this decision. We performed a controlled experiment with one,
two, and four views to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these
strategies on target detection and trend finding tasks in the context
of multidimensional glyphs overlaid onto geographic maps. Results from
the target detection tasks suggest that visual encoding is a more
important factor when detecting a single attribute than the number of
views. Additionally, for detecting two attributes, the trend
indicates that reusing the most perceptually salient visual feature in
multiple views provides faster performance than an integrated view that
must map one of the attributes to a less salient feature.