The rise of visualization systems, journalism, and social media have contributed to a saturation of graphical displays of data in peoples' daily lives. People might use visualizations to reason about a medical diagnosis, a financial decision, or what measures to take in a global pandemic. People also vary in their ability to read and use visualizations they encounter, leaving us with unanswered questions: How much do people vary in their individual experience of a given visualization? Are our graphical display guidelines, painstakingly developed through empirical studies, universally applicable? How is literacy developed, and how can we ensure equitable access to the power and promise of visualization-driven thinking?
Understanding and shaping how individuals experience a visualization is a challenge that deserves attention from the broader research community. Towards this end, I'll share results of research that seeks to quantify the individual experience of visualizations, including techniques that shape how audiences engage with interactive visualizations on the web, and experiments that compare how individuals perform common visualization tasks.