We reflect on our experiences as designers of COVID-19 data visualizations working in a distributed synchronous design space during the pandemic. This is especially relevant as the pandemic posed new challenges to distributed collaboration amidst civic lockdown measures and an increased dependency on spatially distributed teamwork across almost all sectors. Working from home being 'the new normal', we explored potential solutions for collaborating and prototyping remotely from our own homes using the existing tools at our disposal. Since members of our cross-disciplinary team had different technical skills, we used a range of synchronous remote design tools and methods. We aimed to preserve the richness of co-located collaboration such as face-to-face physical presence, body gestures, facial expressions, and the making and sharing of physical artifacts. While meeting over Zoom, we sketched on paper and used digital collaboration tools, such as Miro and Google Docs. Using an auto-ethnographic approach, we articulate our challenges and strategies throughout the process, providing useful insights about synchronous distributed collaboration.
Challenges in Synchronous & Remote Collaboration Around Visualization
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；ENAC Université de Toulouse（图卢兹国立高等航空学院）；Ochanomizu University（御茶水女子大学）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Louisiana State University（路易斯安那州立大学）；Université Paris-Saclay, Inria, CNRS（巴黎萨克雷大学、法国国家信息与自动化研究所、法国国家科学研究中心）；JPMorganChase（摩根大通）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）；University of Minnesota-Twin Cities（明尼苏达大学双城分校）；University of South Australia（南澳大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
Prior research on communicating with visualization has focused on public presentation and asynchronous individual consumption, such as in the domain of journalism. The visualization research community knows comparatively little about synchronous and multimodal communication around data within organizations, from team meetings to executive briefings. We conducted two qualitative interview studies with individuals who prepare and deliver presentations about data to audiences in organizations. In contrast to prior work, we did not limit our interviews to those who self-identify as data analysts o…
Establishing common ground and maintaining shared awareness amongst participants is a key challenge in collaborative visualization. For real-time collaboration, existing work has primarily focused on synchronizing constituent visualizations - an approach that makes it difficult for users to work independently, or selectively attend to their collaborators' activity. To address this gap, we introduce a design space for representing synchronous multi-user collaboration in visualizations defined by two orthogonal axes: situatedness, or whether collaborators' interactions are overlaid on or shown o…
Inclusion and accessibility in visualization research have gained increasing attention in recent years. However, many challenges still remain to be solved on the road toward a more inclusive, shared-experience-driven visualization design and evaluation process. In this position paper, we discuss challenges and speculate about potential solutions, based on related work, our own research, as well as personal experiences. The goal of this paper is to start discussions on the role of accessibility and inclusion in visualization design and evaluation.
We conducted a questionnaire study aimed towards PhD students in the field of visualization research to understand how they cope with paper rejections. We collected responses from 24 participants and performed a qualitative analysis of the data in relation to the provided support by collaborators, resubmission strategies, handling multiple rejects, and personal impression of the reviews. The results indicate that the PhD students in the visualization community generally cope well with the negative reviews and, with experience, learn how to act accordingly to improve and resubmit their work. Ou…
Understanding player strategies is a key question when analyzing player behavior both for academic researchers and industry practitioners. For game designers and game user researchers, it is important to gauge the distance between intended strategies and emergent strategies; this comparison allows identification of glitches or undesirable behaviors. For academic researchers using games for serious purposes such as education, the strategies adopted by players are indicative of their cognitive progress in relation to serious goals, such as learning process. Current techniques and systems created…
Uncertainty visualizations often emphasize point estimates to support magnitude estimates or decisions through visual comparison. However, when design choices emphasize means, users may overlook uncertainty information and misinterpret visual distance as a proxy for effect size. We present findings from a mixed design experiment on Mechanical Turk which tests eight uncertainty visualization designs: 95% containment intervals, hypothetical outcome plots, densities, and quantile dotplots, each with and without means added. We find that adding means to uncertainty visualizations has small biasing…
Increased access to mobile devices motivates the need to design communicative visualizations that are responsive to varying screen sizes. However, relatively little design guidance or tooling is currently available to authors. We contribute a detailed characterization of responsive visualization strategies in communication-oriented visualizations, identifying 76 total strategies by analyzing 378 pairs of large screen (LS) and small screen (SS) visualizations from online articles and reports. Our analysis distinguishes between the Targets of responsive visualization, referring to what elements …
Data visualizations have been increasingly used in oral presentations to communicate data patterns to the general public. Clear verbal introductions of visualizations to explain how to interpret the visually encoded information are essential to convey the takeaways and avoid misunderstandings. We contribute a series of studies to investigate how to effectively introduce visualizations to the audience with varying degrees of visualization literacy. We begin with understanding how people are introducing visualizations. We crowdsource 110 introductions of visualizations and categorize them based …
Designing Born-Accessible Courses in Data Science and Visualization: Challenges and Opportunities of a Remote Curriculum Taught by Blind Instructors to Blind Students
This report documents the results found through surveys and interviews on how visualizations help the employees in their workspace. The objectives of this study were to get in-depth knowledge on what prepares an employee to have the right skill set in constructing an informative visualization as well as the tools and techniques that they use on their daily basis for analysis and visualization purposes. Using the results gathered, we sorted the information in many different ways for analysis and came to conclusions ranging from corporation-based strategies to individualized employee and positio…
This paper draws together nine strategies for creative visualization activities. Teaching visualization often involves running learning activities where students perform tasks that directly support one or more topics that the teacher wishes to address in the lesson. As a group of educators and researchers in visualization, we reflect on our learning experiences. Our activities and experiences range from dividing the tasks into smaller parts, considering different learning materials, to encouraging debate. With this paper, our hope is that we can encourage, inspire, and guide other educators wi…
Problem-based visualization research provides explicit guidance toward identifying and designing for the needs of users, but absent is more concrete guidance toward factors external to a user's needs that also have implications for visualization design and evaluation. This lack of more explicit guidance can leave visualization researchers and practitioners vulnerable to unforeseen constraints beyond the user's needs that can affect the validity of evaluations, or even lead to the premature termination of a project. Here we explore two types of external constraints in depth, regulatory and orga…
The aim of visualization is to support people in dealing with large and complex information structures, to make these structures more comprehensible, facilitate exploration, and enable knowledge discovery. However, users often have problems reading and interpreting data from visualizations, in particular when they experience them for the first time. A lack of visualization literacy, i.e., knowledge in terms of domain, data, visual encoding, interaction, and also analytical methods can be observed. To support users in learning how to use new digital technologies, the concept of onboarding has b…
Conch: Competitive Debate Analysis via Visualizing Clash Points and Hierarchical Strategies
School of Journalism and Information Communication, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学新闻与信息传播学院）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）
Despite recent progress in artificial intelligence and machine learning, many state-of-the-art methods suffer from a lack of explainability and transparency. The ability to interpret the predictions made by machine learning models and accurately evaluate these models is crucially important. In this paper, we present an interactive visualization tool to elucidate the training process of active learning. This tool enables one to select a sample of interesting data points, view how their prediction values change at different querying stages, and thus better understand when and how active learning…
Templates have emerged as an effective approach to simplifying the visualization design and programming process. For example, they enable users to quickly generate multiple visualization designs even when using complex toolkits like D3. However, these templates are often treated as rigid artifacts that respond poorly to changes made outside of the template's established parameters, limiting user creativity. Preserving the user's creative flow requires a more dynamic approach to template-based visualization design, where tools can respond gracefully to users' edits when they modify templates in…
Intelligent power grid research, i.e. smart grid, involves many simultaneous users spread over a relatively large geographical area. A tool for advancing research and community education is presented utilizing large-scale visualization centers, e.g. planetariums, in simulating smart grid interactions. This approach immerses the user in virtual smart grid visualization and allows the user, with several other users, to interact in real time. This facilitates community education by demonstrating how the power grid functions with smart technologies. The simulation is sophisticated enough to also b…
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…
The State University of New York at Binghamton（纽约州立大学宾汉姆顿分校）
In human-robot collaboration domains, augmented reality (AR) technologies have enabled people to visualize the state of robots. Current AR-based visualization policies are designed manually, which requires a lot of human efforts and domain knowledge. When too little information is visualized, human users find the AR interface not useful; when too much information is visualized, they find it difficult to process the visualized information. In this paper, we develop a framework, called VARIL, that enables AR agents to learn visualization policies (what to visualize, when, and how) from demonstra…
