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How do People Make Sense of Unfamiliar Visualizations?

A Grounded Model of Novice’s Information Visualization Sensemaking

Presented by: Andrew BurksLee et al. 2016

Overview

How do People Make Sense of Unfamiliar Visualizations?

Overview

Why pick these visualizations and data? - Aditi

ContributionA grounded model of NOvice’s information VIsualization Sensemaking (NOVIS model)

1. Encountering Visualization2. Constructing a Frame3. Exploring Visualization4. Questioning the frame5. Floundering on visualization

Fig. 2

Contribution

Fig. 2

Research Design

• 13 Participants• 3 unfamiliar vis (PCP, chord, treemap)• Collect audio/video record of think-aloud and interview

Conceptualization

How do novice users build understanding of unfamiliar visualizations?

Operationalization

Measure the user’s thought process throughout visualization sensemaking

Metrics

Recorded audio/video from the think-aloud session and semi-structured interview

Open coding was used to derive this model

Fig. 4

Open coding was used to derive this model

Fig. 4

● The "Floundering on Visualization" stage should not

be a stage on its own, but rather a part of one a

loop. Because not every participant went through

that stage as figure 4a shows and it is not a critical

stage, from my point of view. - Nina

● 3 authors performed the coding — couldn't there be

inconsistencies? They don't discuss how they

weight or combine the coding - Arthur & Pantea

● What methods could be used to help control prior

knowledge for interpreting the visualizations? -

Jesse

Lack of Frame Reconstruction

Fig. 5

• Someone instantly understood a treemap (somehow… 1)• Someone didn’t like cars so they didn’t engage at all

with the PCP

Exceptional Cases

[1] Dang, T., Murray, P., Etemadpour, R., & Forbes, A. G. (2017). A User Study of Techniques for Visualizing Structure and Connectivity in Hierarchical Datasets. In VOILA@ ISWC (pp. 45-59).

Future Research

1. What other presentation strategies could assist in constructing a correct frame?

2. How does personal interest on content affect the visualization sensemaking?

3. What are the uncovered sensemaking activities? 4. How do experts make sense of unfamiliar visualizations?

3

Figure 2 does a nice job illustrating the author's grounded method. While the authors describe some surprising results in regards to their theory,

very little is discussed about how that would affect changes to the model other than citing as future work - they finish describing the paper as a

first step for their model. - Arthur

Strengths

• The study and research are well-supported• The visualization choices are justified• The coding didn’t just produce a simple theory — they

derived a state transition diagram from it

Weaknesses

• Think-aloud sessions may miss thought processes• There were only 3 disparate encodings studied• I think it can be difficult to model something like this

What I’d do differently

• Instead of just looking at a complicated visualization, show the same data with basic visualization(s)

• Attempt to bridge between basic/complex encoding, possibly through a linked visualization

thx