74,310 research outputs found
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Creative User-Centered Visualization Design for Energy Analysts and Modelers
We enhance a user-centered design process with techniques that deliberately promote creativity to identify opportunities for the visualization of data generated by a major energy supplier. Visualization prototypes developed in this way prove effective in a situation whereby data sets are largely unknown and requirements open – enabling successful exploration of possibilities for visualization in Smart Home data analysis. The process gives rise to novel designs and design metaphors including data sculpting. It suggests: that the deliberate use of creativity techniques with data stakeholders is likely to contribute to successful, novel and effective solutions; that being explicit about creativity may contribute to designers developing creative solutions; that using creativity techniques early in the design process may result in a creative approach persisting throughout the process. The work constitutes the first systematic visualization design for a data rich source that will be increasingly important to energy suppliers and consumers as Smart Meter technology is widely deployed. It is novel in explicitly employing creativity techniques at the requirements stage of visualization design and development, paving the way for further use and study of creativity methods in visualization design
On Regulatory and Organizational Constraints in Visualization Design and Evaluation
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
organizational constraints, and describe how these constraints impact
visualization design and evaluation. By borrowing from techniques in software
development, project management, and visualization research we recommend
strategies for identifying, mitigating, and evaluating these external
constraints through a design study methodology. Finally, we present an
application of those recommendations in a healthcare case study. We argue that
by explicitly incorporating external constraints into visualization design and
evaluation, researchers and practitioners can improve the utility and validity
of their visualization solution and improve the likelihood of successful
collaborations with industries where external constraints are more present.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, presented at BELIV workshop associated with IEEE
VIS 201
What May Visualization Processes Optimize?
In this paper, we present an abstract model of visualization and inference
processes and describe an information-theoretic measure for optimizing such
processes. In order to obtain such an abstraction, we first examined six
classes of workflows in data analysis and visualization, and identified four
levels of typical visualization components, namely disseminative,
observational, analytical and model-developmental visualization. We noticed a
common phenomenon at different levels of visualization, that is, the
transformation of data spaces (referred to as alphabets) usually corresponds to
the reduction of maximal entropy along a workflow. Based on this observation,
we establish an information-theoretic measure of cost-benefit ratio that may be
used as a cost function for optimizing a data visualization process. To
demonstrate the validity of this measure, we examined a number of successful
visualization processes in the literature, and showed that the
information-theoretic measure can mathematically explain the advantages of such
processes over possible alternatives.Comment: 10 page
An Introduction to 3D User Interface Design
3D user interface design is a critical component of any virtual environment (VE) application. In this paper, we present a broad overview of three-dimensional (3D) interaction and user interfaces. We discuss the effect of common VE hardware devices on user interaction, as well as interaction techniques for generic 3D tasks and the use of traditional two-dimensional interaction styles in 3D environments. We divide most user interaction tasks into three categories: navigation, selection/manipulation, and system control. Throughout the paper, our focus is on presenting not only the available techniques, but also practical guidelines for 3D interaction design and widely held myths. Finally, we briefly discuss two approaches to 3D interaction design, and some example applications with complex 3D interaction requirements. We also present an annotated online bibliography as a reference companion to this article
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Prototyping a process-centered environment
This paper describes an experimental system developed and used as a vehicle for prototyping the Arcadia-1 software development environment. Prototyping is viewed as a knowledge acquisition process and is used to reduce risks in software development by gaining rapid feedback about the suitability of a production system before the system is completed. Prototyping a software development environment is particularly important due to the lack of experience with them. There is an acute need to acquire knowledge about user interaction requirements for software environments. These needs are especially important for the Arcadia project, as it is one of the first attempts to construct a process-centered environment. Our prototyping effort addresses questions about effective interaction with a process-centered environment by simulating how Arcadia-1 would interact with users in a representative range of usage scenarios. We built a prototyping system, called PRODUCER, and used it to generate a variety of prototypes simulating user interactions with Arcadia-1 process programs.Experience with PRODUCER indicates that our approach is effective at risk reduction. The prototypes greatly improved communication with our customer. They confirmed some of our design decisions but also redirected our research efforts as a result of unexpected insight. We also found that prototyping usage scenarios provides conceptual guides and design information for process programmers. Most of the benefits of our prototyping effort derive from developing and interacting with usage scenarios, so our approach is generalizable to other prototyping systems. This paper reports on our prototyping approach and our experience in prototyping a process-centered environment
You can't always sketch what you want: Understanding Sensemaking in Visual Query Systems
Visual query systems (VQSs) empower users to interactively search for line
charts with desired visual patterns, typically specified using intuitive
sketch-based interfaces. Despite decades of past work on VQSs, these efforts
have not translated to adoption in practice, possibly because VQSs are largely
evaluated in unrealistic lab-based settings. To remedy this gap in adoption, we
collaborated with experts from three diverse domains---astronomy, genetics, and
material science---via a year-long user-centered design process to develop a
VQS that supports their workflow and analytical needs, and evaluate how VQSs
can be used in practice. Our study results reveal that ad-hoc sketch-only
querying is not as commonly used as prior work suggests, since analysts are
often unable to precisely express their patterns of interest. In addition, we
characterize three essential sensemaking processes supported by our enhanced
VQS. We discover that participants employ all three processes, but in different
proportions, depending on the analytical needs in each domain. Our findings
suggest that all three sensemaking processes must be integrated in order to
make future VQSs useful for a wide range of analytical inquiries.Comment: Accepted for presentation at IEEE VAST 2019, to be held October 20-25
in Vancouver, Canada. Paper will also be published in a special issue of IEEE
Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) IEEE VIS
(InfoVis/VAST/SciVis) 2019 ACM 2012 CCS - Human-centered computing,
Visualization, Visualization design and evaluation method
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