Infographic designers balance many choices at once: chart type, color, and whether to add a benchmark or a scale. Past work studies these factors one at a time, so we know little about how readers weigh them against each other. We address this gap with a choice-based conjoint study (N = 65) in which participants viewed pairs of infographics on a mock newspaper page about unemployment. Each infographic varied across three attributes: comparison type (none, US average, percentage scale), color (red, blue), and graphic type (single icon, icon series, bar chart). Comparison type drove most of the preference variation (58.5%), followed by graphic type (29.2%) and color (12.3%). Readers favored percentage scale markers and benchmark comparisons; color had no practical effect. The percentage scale level adds axis information rather than a benchmark, so the comparison type result mixes two distinct ideas. A single topic and a narrow palette also limit external validity. We argue that conjoint analysis is a practical and underused tool for studying visualization preferences across many design dimensions.

翻译：信息图设计者需要同时平衡众多选择：图表类型、配色方案，以及是否添加基准线或刻度标识。以往研究往往逐一探讨这些因素，导致我们难以了解读者如何在各因素间进行权衡。为填补这一空白，我们开展了基于选择法的联合研究（N=65），让参与者在一份模拟报纸的失业率专题页面上观察成对的信息图。每幅信息图在三个属性维度上存在差异：比较类型（无比较、全美平均值、百分比刻度）、颜色（红色、蓝色）和图形类型（单一图标、图标序列、柱状图）。比较类型对偏好的影响贡献最大（58.5%），其次依次为图形类型（29.2%）和颜色（12.3%）。读者更青睐百分比刻度标记和基准比较；颜色实际效果微弱。由于百分比刻度水平提供的是坐标轴信息而非基准线，比较类型的结果实际上混合了两种不同概念。单一主题和有限的色调范围也制约了外部效度。我们认为，联合分析法是一种实用且尚未被充分利用的工具，可用于研究多维度设计参数下的可视化偏好。