A Graphical Workflow Exploration Environment For Visual Analytics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visual workflow management environment designed to help analysts review, edit, and collaborate on complex workflows in visual analytics, supported by case and user studies.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel graphical workflow environment tailored for visual analytics, developed through a design study with domain experts and evaluated via case and user studies.

Findings

The environment facilitates collaborative review and communication among analysts.

It improves users' ability to explore and understand complex workflows.

The history mechanism influences users' problem-solving behaviors.

Abstract

Graphical history mechanisms have been widely utilized in many domains to support humans' limited working memory, error recovery, collaboration, and presentation in visual analysis. Yet, there are aspects that remain under-explored in designing graphical history systems for visual analytics systems to help analysts who have complicated workflows. In this paper we report on our design study performed with domain experts, where we characterize domain tasks and designed a visual graphical workflow management environment. Our environment allows analysts to efficiently review, edit, navigate, and explore their complex workflows with their colleagues. In order to evaluate the environment, we present a case study and user study. In the case study, we explore how two domain experts perform collaborative review, communication, and training with our environment; while in the user study with the car data, we reveal that how our environment helps users and how the history mechanism affects users' visual problem-solving behaviors.