A Comprehensive Study on the Aesthetics of Electricity Consumption Graphs on Appliance Level and their Triggering Potential on Human Emotions

Sustainable energy consumption behavior in households is a decisive factor in contributing to climate protection. To provide residents comprehensible insights into their household’s energy consumption data, nonintrusive load monitoring on appliance level can assist. To give consumers a simple and comprehensible overview of their consumption data, which they also find aesthetically pleasing, in this work a two-stage experimental design is used to compare the perceived aesthetic appearance of different types of electricity consumption graphs on appliance level (aggregated or time-dependent) and their triggered emotion. First, a representative survey covers the general aesthetics assessment in a 2x3 mixed factorial design. Second, an in-depth eye-tracking and facial expression investigation is used to track and quantify emotions on different electricity consumption graphs on application level and their perceived advantages and disadvantages. The main results provide comprehensive insights into the aesthetics of electricity consumption visualizations to trigger positive emotions, in particular users’ preferences for simple and conventional graphs like bar charts.