Characterizing Visualization Insights through Entity-Based Interaction: An Exploratory Study

TL;DR

This study explores how entity-based interactions in visualizations influence user insights, revealing that referencing entities enhances insight characterization and providing implications for knowledge-assisted visualization systems.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze the impact of entity-based interactions on insights and demonstrates their effectiveness through a crowdsourced user study.

Findings

Entity references improve insight characterization accuracy.

Detailed insights correlate with more mouse-overs and specific references.

Entity-based interaction analysis informs knowledge-assisted visualization design.

Abstract

One of the primary purposes of visualization is to assist users in discovering insights. While there has been much research in information visualization aiming at complex data transformation and novel presentation techniques, relatively little has been done to understand how users derive insights through interactive visualization of data. This paper presents a crowdsourced study with 158 participants investigating the relation between entity-based interaction (an action + its target entity) and the resulting insight. To this end, we generalized the interaction with an existing CO2 Explorer as entity-based interaction and enabled users to input notes and refer to relevant entities to assist their narratives. We logged interactions of users freely exploring the visualization and characterized their externalized insights about the data. Using entity-based interactions and references to infer insight characteristics (category, overview versus detail, and prior knowledge), we found evidence that compared with interactions, entity references improved insight characterization from slight/fair to fair/moderate agreements. To interpret prediction outcomes, feature importance and correlation analysis indicated that, e.g., detailed insights tended to have more mouse-overs in the chart area and cite the vertical reference lines in the line chart as evidence. We discuss study limitations and implications on knowledge-assisted visualization, e.g., insight recommendations based on user exploration.