Visualization guidelines, if defined properly, are invaluable to both practical applications and the theoretical foundation of visualization. In this paper, we present a collection of research activities for studying visualization guidelines according to Grounded Theory (GT). We used the discourses at VisGuides, which is an online discussion forum for visualization guidelines, as the main data source for enabling data-driven research processes as advocated by the grounded theory methodology. We devised a categorization scheme focusing on observing how visualization guidelines were featured in different threads and posts at VisGuides, and coded all 248 posts between September 27, 2017 (when VisGuides was first launched) and March 13, 2019. To complement manual categorization and coding, we used text analysis and visualization to help reveal patterns that may have been missed by the manual effort and summary statistics. To facilitate theoretical sampling and negative case analysis, we made an in-depth analysis of the 148 posts (with both questions and replies) related to a student assignment of a visualization course. Inspired by two discussion threads at VisGuides, we conducted two controlled empirical studies to collect further data to validate specific visualization guidelines. Through these activities guided by grounded theory, we have obtained some new findings about visualization guidelines.
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）
Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles are complex systems of hardware, software, and human input. Understanding this complexity is key to their development and operation. Information visualizations already exist for exploring flight logs but comprehensive analyses currently require several disparate and custom tools. This design study helps address the pain points faced by autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle developers and operators. We contribute: a spiral development process model for grounded evaluation visualization development focused on progressively broadening target user involvement and r…
Many data abstraction types, such as networks or set relationships, remain unfamiliar to data workers beyond the visualization research community. We conduct a survey and series of interviews about how people describe their data, either directly or indirectly. We refer to the latter as latent data abstractions. We conduct a Grounded Theory analysis that (1) interprets the extent to which latent data abstractions exist, (2) reveals the far-reaching effects that the interventionist pursuit of such abstractions can have on data workers, (3) describes why and when data workers may resist such expl…
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…
Structured Visualization Design Knowledge for Grounding Generative Reasoning and Situated Feedback
University of Vienna（维也纳大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna（维也纳大学计算机学院）；Austrian Institute of Technology（奥地利技术研究所）
In this paper, we describe a research agenda for deriving design principles directly from data. We argue that it is time to go beyond manually curated and applied visualization design guidelines. We propose learning models of visualization design from data collected using graphical perception studies and build tools powered by the learned models. To achieve this vision, we need to 1) develop scalable methods for collecting training data, 2) collect different forms of training data, 3) advance interpretability of machine learning models, and 4) develop adaptive models that evolve as more data b…
While many visualization researchers have attempted to define data insights, little is known about how visualization users perceive them. We interviewed 23 professional users of end-user visualization platforms (e.g., Tableau and Power BI) about their experiences with data insights. We report on seven characteristics of data insights based on interviewees' descriptions. Grounded in these characteristics, we propose practical implications for creating tools that aim to automatically communicate data insights to users.
Many of the guidelines that inform how designers create data visualizations originate in studies that unintentionally exclude populations that are most likely to be among the 'data poor'. In this paper, we explore which factors may drive attention and trust in rural populations with diverse economic and educational backgrounds - a segment that is largely underrepresented in the data visualization literature. In 42 semi-structured interviews in rural Pennsylvania (USA), we find that a complex set of factors intermix to inform attitudes and perceptions about data visualization - including educat…
The many genres of narrative visualization (e.g. data comics, data videos) each offer a unique set of affordances and constraints. To better understand a genre that we call cinematic visualizations-3D visualizations that make highly deliberate use of a camera to convey a narrative-we gathered 50 examples and analyzed their traditional cinematic aspects to identify the benefits and limitations of the form. While the cinematic visualization approach can violate traditional rules of visualization, we find that through careful control of the camera, cinematic visualizations enable immersion in dat…
Why did My Robot Just Change Personality? Prompting Guidelines for a Grounded Robot Persona in LLM-Based HRI
RPTU Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕工业大学）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）；University of Hertfordshire（赫特福德大学）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Naples Federico II（那不勒斯费德里科二世大学）；Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（本-古里安大学内盖夫分校）；The Azrieli National Center for Autism and Neurodevelopment Research（阿兹列利国家自闭症与神经发育研究中心）
While human beings have a right to digital experiences that support, rather than diminish, their psychological wellbeing, technology designers lack research-based practices for ensuring psychological needs are met. To help address this gap, we draw on findings from over 30 years of research in psychology (specifically, self-determination theory) that has identified contextual factors shown to support psychological wellbeing. We translate these findings into a list of 15 heuristics and 30 design strategies to provide technology makers with theoretically grounded, research-based, and actionable …
A growing number of efforts aim to understand what people see when using a visualization. These efforts provide scientific grounding to complement design intuitions, leading to more effective visualization practice. However, published visualization research currently reflects a limited set of available methods for understanding how people process visualized data. Alternative methods from vision science offer a rich suite of tools for understanding visualizations, but no curated collection of these methods exists in either perception or visualization research. We introduce a design space of exp…
Visualizations often encode numeric data using sequential and diverging color ramps. Effective ramps use colors that are sufficiently discriminable, align well with the data, and are aesthetically pleasing. Designers rely on years of experience to create high-quality color ramps. However, it is challenging for novice visualization developers that lack this experience to craft effective ramps as most guidelines for constructing ramps are loosely defined qualitative heuristics that are often difficult to apply. Our goal is to enable visualization developers to readily create effective color enco…
We present a systematic review on three comparative layouts (i.e., juxtaposition, superposition, and explicit-encoding) which are information visualization (InfoVis) layouts designed to support comparison tasks. For the last decade, these layouts have served as fundamental idioms in designing many visualization systems. However, we found that the layouts have been used with inconsistent terms and confusion, and the lessons from previous studies are fragmented. The goal of our research is to distill the results from previous studies into a consistent and reusable framework. We review 127 resear…
This research investigates how people engage with data visualizations when commenting on the social platform Reddit. There has been considerable research on collaborative sensemaking with visualizations and the personal relation of people with data. Yet, little is known about how public audiences without specific expertise and shared incentives openly express their thoughts, feelings, and insights in response to data visualizations. Motivated by the extensive social exchange around visualizations in online communities, this research examines characteristics and motivations of people's reaction…
The trouble with data is that it frequently provides only an imperfect representation of a phenomenon of interest. Experts who are familiar with their datasets will often make implicit, mental corrections when analyzing a dataset, or will be cautious not to be over-confident in any findings if caveats are present. However, the implicit knowledge about the caveats of a dataset are typically not collected in a structured way, which is problematic especially when teams work together who might have knowledge about different aspects of a dataset. In this work, we define such analyst's knowledge abo…
Visualizations are an essential part of biomedical analysis result interpretation. Often, interactive networks are used to visualize the data. However, the high interconnectivity, and high dimensionality of the data often results in information overload, making it hard to interpret the results. To address the information overload problem, existing solutions typically either use data reduction, reduced interactivity, or expensive hardware. We propose using the affordable Oculus Quest Virtual Reality (VR) headset for interactive visualization of large-scale biological networks. We present the de…
Visual information displays are typically composed of multiple visualizations that are used to facilitate an understanding of the underlying data. A common example are dashboards, which are frequently used in domains such as finance, process monitoring and business intelligence. However, users may not be aware of existing guidelines and lack expert design knowledge when composing such multi-view visualizations. In this paper, we present semantic snapping, an approach to help non-expert users design effective multi-view visualizations from sets of pre-existing views. When a particular view is p…
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）
Well-designed data visualizations can lead to more powerful and intuitive processing by a viewer. To help a viewer intuitively compare values to quickly generate key takeaways, visualization designers can manipulate how data values are arranged in a chart to afford particular comparisons. Using simple bar charts as a case study, we empirically tested the comparison affordances of four common arrangements: vertically juxtaposed, horizontally juxtaposed, overlaid, and stacked. We asked participants to type out what patterns they perceived in a chart, and coded their takeaways into types of compa…
Timelines are commonly represented on a horizontal line, which is not necessarily the most effective way to visualize temporal event sequences. However, few experiments have evaluated how timeline shape influences task performance. We present the design and results of a controlled experiment run on Amazon Mechanical Turk (n=192) in which we evaluate how timeline shape affects task completion time, correctness, and user preference. We tested 12 combinations of 4 shapes -- horizontal line, vertical line, circle, and spiral -- and 3 data types -- recurrent, non-recurrent, and mixed event sequence…
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）
Multiple-view visualization (MV) is a layout design technique often employed to help users see a large number of data attributes and values in a single cohesive representation. Because of its generalizability, the MV design has been widely adopted by the visualization community to help users examine and interact with large, complex, and high-dimensional data. However, although ubiquitous, there has been little work to categorize and analyze MVs in order to better understand its design space. As a result, there has been little to no guideline in how to use the MV design effectively. In this pap…
The VAST Challenges have been shown to be an effective tool in visual analytics education, encouraging student learning while enforcing good visualization design and development practices. However, research has observed that students often struggle at identifying a good "starting point" when tackling the VAST Challenge. Consequently, students who could not identify a good starting point failed at finding the correct solution to the challenge. In this paper, we propose a preliminary guideline for helping students approach the VAST Challenge and identify initial analysis directions. We recruited…
Comparison is a core task in visual analysis. Although there are numerous guidelines to help users design effective visualizations to aid known comparison tasks, there are few formalisms that define the semantics of comparison operations in a way that can serve as the basis for a grammar of comparison interactions. Recent work proposed a formalism called View Composition Algebra (VCA) that enables ad hoc comparisons between any combination of marks, trends, or charts in a visualization interface. However, VCA limits comparisons to visual representations of data that have an identical schema, o…
Mobile devices, specifically, smartphones proved easy and quick access to data visualisations throughout various tracking apps. Mobile health (mHealth) apps have given non-expert users access to data visualisation to track their activities and health-related issues such as heart tracking and medication. However, no work is done on user experience or perception of data visualisations in mHealth apps. App reviews offer an indirect anchor for researchers to examine how non-expert users perceive and interact with data visualisations and identify the key challenges and recommendations. This paper i…
University of Kaiserslautern–Landau (RPTU)（凯撒斯劳滕-兰道大学（RPTU））；Department of Data Science and its Applications, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（数据科学及其应用系，德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））
Current web accessibility guidelines ask visualization designers to support screen readers via basic non-visual alternatives like textual descriptions and access to raw data tables. But charts do more than summarize data or reproduce tables; they afford interactive data exploration at varying levels of granularity -- from fine-grained datum-by-datum reading to skimming and surfacing high-level trends. In response to the lack of comparable non-visual affordances, we present a set of rich screen reader experiences for accessible data visualization and exploration. Through an iterative co-design …
