A Design Space for Multiscale Visualization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive design space framework for multiscale visualization, enabling better understanding, analysis, and generation of visualization approaches across various contexts.

Contribution

It defines a novel, structured design space with three dimensions and eight subdimensions, and demonstrates its utility in analyzing and categorizing multiscale visualization approaches.

Findings

Identified four high-level strategies for multiscale visualization design.

Analyzed 52 examples to demonstrate the design space's descriptive power.

Highlighted opportunities for improved design choices through analysis of missed opportunities.

Abstract

Designing multiscale visualizations, particularly when the ratio between the largest scale and the smallest item is large, can be challenging, and designers have developed many approaches to overcome this challenge. We present a design space for visualization with multiple scales. The design space includes three dimensions, with eight total subdimensions. We demonstrate its descriptive power by using it to code approaches from a corpus we compiled of 52 examples, created by a mix of academics and practitioners. We demonstrate descriptive power by analyzing and partitioning these examples into four high-level strategies for designing multiscale visualizations, which are shared approaches with respect to design space dimension choices. We demonstrate generative power by analyzing missed opportunities within the corpus of examples, identified through analysis of the design space, where we note how certain examples could have benefited from different choices. We discuss patterns in the use of different dimension and strategy choices in the different visualization contexts of analysis and presentation. Supplemental materials: https://osf.io/wbrdm/ Design space website: https://marasolen.github.io/multiscale-vis-ds/