Low-level components of analytic activity in information visualization

TLDR

Existing system-level taxonomies of visualization tasks focus on representation design rather than facilitating user analytic activity. The authors present ten low-level analysis tasks that capture users’ activities with information visualization tools and aim to provide designers with a common substrate for discussing analytic capabilities. They derived these tasks by collecting nearly 200 sample questions from students about how they would analyze five diverse data sets. The questions revealed a wide variety of analytic questions users pose, and the resulting tasks may serve as a checklist for system designers.

Abstract

Existing system level taxonomies of visualization tasks are geared more towards the design of particular representations than the facilitation of user analytic activity. We present a set of ten low level analysis tasks that largely capture people's activities while employing information visualization tools for understanding data. To help develop these tasks, we collected nearly 200 sample questions from students about how they would analyze five particular data sets from different domains. The questions, while not being totally comprehensive, illustrated the sheer variety of analytic questions typically posed by users when employing information visualization systems. We hope that the presented set of tasks is useful for information visualization system designers as a kind of common substrate to discuss the relative analytic capabilities of the systems. Further, the tasks may provide a form of checklist for system designers.