The development and design of visualization solutions that are truly usable is essential for ensuring both their adoption and effectiveness. User-centered design principles, which focus on involving users throughout the entire development process, are well suited for visualization and have been shown to be effective in numerous information visualization endeavors. In this paper, we report a two year long collaboration with combustion scientists that, by applying these design principles, generated multiple results including an in situ visualization technique and a post hoc probability distribution function (PDF) exploration tool. Furthermore, we examine the importance of user-centered design principles and describe lessons learned over the design process in an effort to aid others who also seek to work with scientists for developing effective and usable scientific visualization solutions.
Patient-centered visualization of multistage cancer treatment trajectories
University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons（格劳宾登应用科学大学）；Universitätsklinikum Carl Gustav Carus an der Technischen Universität Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学卡尔·古斯塔夫·卡鲁斯大学附属医院）
Due to their pedagogical advantages, large final projects in information visualization courses have become standard practice. Students take on a client--real or simulated--a dataset, and a vague set of goals to create a complete visualization or visual analytics product. Unfortunately, many projects suffer from ambiguous goals, over or under-constrained client expectations, and data constraints that have students spending their time on non-visualization problems (e.g., data cleaning). These are important skills, but are often secondary course objectives, and unforeseen problems can majorly hin…
The optimization of information visualizations is time consuming and expensive. To reduce this we propose an improvement of existing optimization approaches based on user-centered design, focusing on readability, comprehensibility, and user satisfaction as optimization goals. The changes comprise (1) a separate optimization of user interface and representation, (2) a fully automated evaluation of the representation, and (3) qualitative user studies for simultaneously creating and evaluating interface variants. On the basis of these results we are able to find a local optimum of an information …
Computing professionals in areas like compilers, performance analysis, and security often analyze and manipulate control flow graphs (CFGs) in their work. CFGs are directed networks that describe possible orderings of instructions in the execution of a program. Visualizing a CFG is a common activity in developing or debugging computational approaches that use them. However, general graph drawing layouts, including the hierarchical ones frequently applied to CFGs, do not capture CFG-specific structures or tasks and thus the resulting drawing may not match the needs of their audience, especially…
E-maintenance is a technology aiming to organize and structure the ICT during the whole life cycle of the product, to develop a maintenance support system that is effective and efficient. A current challenge of E-maintenance is the development of generic visualization solutions for users responsible for the maintenance. AR can be a potential technology for E-maintenance visualization, since it can bring knowledge to the real physical world, to assist the technician perform his/her work without the need to interrupt to consult manuals for information. This paper proposes a methodology for the d…
We have developed (1) a graph visualization system that allows users to explore graphs by viewing them as a succession of spanning trees selected interactively, (2) a radial graph layout algorithm, and (3) an animation algorithm that generates meaningful visualizations and smooth transitions between graphs while minimizing edge crossings during transitions and in static layouts. Our system is similar to the radial layout system of Yee et al. (2001), but differs primarily in that each node is positioned on a coordinate system centered on its own parent rather than on a single coordinate system …
We introduce AVAR, a prototypical implementation of an agile situated visualization (SV) toolkit targeting liveness, integration, and expressiveness. We report on results of an exploratory study with AVAR and seven expert users. In it, participants wore a Microsoft HoloLens device and used a Bluetooth keyboard to program a visualization script for a given dataset. To support our analysis, we (i) video recorded sessions, (ii) tracked users' interactions, and (iii) collected data of participants' impressions. Our prototype confirms that agile SV is feasible. That is, liveness boosted participant…
CHART-6: Human-Centered Evaluation of Data Visualization Understanding in Vision-Language Models
Department of Psychology at Stanford University（斯坦福大学心理学系）；Department of Linguistics at Stanford University（斯坦福大学语言学系）；Department of Communication at University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校传播系）
Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities（海德堡科学院）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；University of Wuppertal（伍珀塔尔大学）
Media bias and its extreme form, fake news, can decisively affect public opinion. Especially when reporting on policy issues, slanted news coverage may strongly influence societal decisions, e.g., in democratic elections. Our paper makes three contributions to address this issue. First, we present a system for bias identification, which combines state-of-the-art methods from natural language understanding. Second, we devise bias-sensitive visualizations to communicate bias in news articles to non-expert news consumers. Third, our main contribution is a large-scale user study that measures bias…
AI-Centered Grand Challenges in Visual Analytics for Healthcare: Synthesizing the VAHC 2025 Community Experience
University of Zürich（苏黎世大学）；TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）；University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）
Sports game data is becoming increasingly complex, often consisting of multivariate data such as player performance stats, historical team records, and athletes' positional tracking information. While numerous visual analytics systems have been developed for sports analysts to derive insights, few tools target fans to improve their understanding and engagement of sports data during live games. By presenting extra data in the actual game views, embedded visualization has the potential to enhance fans' game-viewing experience. However, little is known about how to design such kinds of visualizat…
From zero to figure hero. A checklist for designing scientific data visualizations
University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons/Graubünden（格劳宾登应用科学大学）；Medical Faculty Universitätsklinikum Carl Gustav Carus an der Technischen Universität Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学卡尔古斯塔夫·卡鲁斯医科大学附属医院）
We are interested in questions of improving user control in best-match text-retrieval systems, specifically questions as to whether simple visualizations that nonetheless go beyond the minimal ones generally available can significantly help users. Recently, we have been investigating ways to help users decide-given a set of documents retrieved by a query-which documents and passages are worth closer examination. We built a document viewer incorporating a visualization centered around a novel content-displaying scrollbar and color term highlighting, and studied whether the visualization is help…
Guidelines Are Not Rules: Characterizing Terminologies around Visualization Design Guidelines
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；University of Utah（犹他大学）；Autodesk Research（欧特克研究）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Inria（法国国家数字技术研究院）；LISN（信息与系统科学实验室）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Oklahoma（俄克拉荷马大学）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）
Package managers provide ease of access to applications by removing the time-consuming and sometimes completely prohibitive barrier of successfully building, installing, and maintaining the software for a system. A package dependency contains dependencies between all packages required to build and run the target software. Package management system developers, package maintainers, and users may consult the dependency graph when a simple listing is insufficient for their analyses. However, users working in a remote command line environment must disrupt their workflow to visualize dependency grap…
We present how to integrate Design Sprints and project-based learning into introductory visualization courses. A design sprint is a unique process based on rapid prototyping and user testing to define goals and validate ideas before starting costly development. The well-defined, interactive, and time-constrained design cycle makes design sprints a promising option for teaching project-based and active-learning-centered courses to increase student engagement and hands-on experience. Over the past five years, we have adjusted the design sprint methodology for teaching a range of visualization co…
During the preceding decades, human gait analysis has been the center of attention for the scientific community, while the association between gait analysis and overall health monitoring has been extensively reported. Technological advances further assisted in this alignment, resulting in access to inexpensive and remote healthcare services. Various assessment tools, such as software platforms and mobile applications, have been proposed by the scientific community and the market that employ sensors to monitor human gait for various purposes ranging from biomechanics to the progression of funct…
Today, there is a plethora of software security tools employing visualizations that enable the creation of useful and effective interactive security analyst dashboards. Such dashboards can assist the analyst to understand the data at hand and, consequently, to conceive more targeted preemption and mitigation security strategies. Despite the recent advances, model-based security analysis is lacking tools that employ effective dashboards---to manage potential attack vectors, system components, and requirements. This problem is further exacerbated because model-based security analysis produces si…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of data visualizations were created to inform the public about the rapidly evolving crisis. Data dashboards, a form of information dissemination used during the pandemic, have facilitated this process by visualizing statistics regarding the number of COVID-19 cases over time. In this research, we conducted a qualitative interview study among dashboard creators from federal agencies, state health departments, mainstream news media outlets, and other organizations that created (often widely-used) COVID-19 dashboards to answer the following questions: how di…
Machine learning (ML) recourse techniques are increasingly used in high-stakes domains, providing end users with actions to alter ML predictions, but they assume ML developers understand what input variables can be changed. However, a recourse plan's actionability is subjective and unlikely to match developers' expectations completely. We present GAM Coach, a novel open-source system that adapts integer linear programming to generate customizable counterfactual explanations for Generalized Additive Models (GAMs), and leverages interactive visualizations to enable end users to iteratively gener…
State-of-the-art visual analytics techniques in application domains are often designed by VA professionals over qualitative requirement collected from end users. These VA techniques may not leverage users' domain knowledge about how to achieve their analytical goals. In this position paper, we propose a user-driven design process of VA applications centered around a new concept called analytical representation (AR). AR features a formal abstraction of user requirement and their desired analytical trails for certain VA application, and is independent of the actual visualization design. A concep…
Chiba University（千叶大学）；Center for Frontier Medical Engineering（前沿医学工程中心）
The self-organizing map (SOM) is an unsupervised artificial neural network that is widely used in, e.g., data mining and visualization. Supervised and semi-supervised learning methods have been proposed for the SOM. However, their teacher labels do not describe the relationship between the data and the location of nodes. This study proposes a landmark map (LAMA), which is an extension of the SOM that utilizes several landmarks, e.g., pairs of nodes and data points. LAMA is designed to obtain a user-intended nonlinear projection to achieve, e.g., the landmark-oriented data visualization. To rev…
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；University of Massachusetts Boston（马萨诸塞大学波士顿分校）
We present AutoDOViz, an interactive user interface for automated decision optimization (AutoDO) using reinforcement learning (RL). Decision optimization (DO) has classically being practiced by dedicated DO researchers where experts need to spend long periods of time fine tuning a solution through trial-and-error. AutoML pipeline search has sought to make it easier for a data scientist to find the best machine learning pipeline by leveraging automation to search and tune the solution. More recently, these advances have been applied to the domain of AutoDO, with a similar goal to find the best …
