Representing Real-Time Multi-User Collaboration in Visualizations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new design space for representing multi-user collaboration in visualizations, enabling flexible and expressive synchronous collaboration through various visual and interaction techniques.

Contribution

It defines a novel design space based on situatedness and specificity, and provides a reference implementation for collaborative visualizations using Vega-Lite.

Findings

Supports diverse collaboration styles with multiple visual representations

Enables users to peek, track, and fork views for effective collaboration

Demonstrates flexible, expressive synchronous collaboration in visualizations

Abstract

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 outside of a user's view, and specificity, or whether collaborators are depicted through abstract, generic representations or through specific means customized for the given visualization. We populate this design space with a variety of examples including generic and custom synchronized cursors, and user legends that collect these cursors together or reproduce collaborators' views as thumbnails. To build common ground, users can interact with these representations by peeking to take a quick look at a collaborator's view, tracking to follow along with a collaborator in real-time, and forking to independently explore the visualization based on a collaborator's work. We present a reference implementation of a wrapper library that converts interactive Vega-Lite charts into collaborative visualizations. We find that our approach affords synchronous collaboration across an expressive range of visual designs and interaction techniques.