What We Augment When We Augment Visualizations: A Design Elicitation Study of How We Visually Express Data Relationships

TL;DR

This study explores how users intuitively augment visualizations to express data relationships, revealing a user-defined design space and a collection of hand-drawn augmentation examples.

Contribution

It introduces a user-centered design space for visualization augmentations, a repository of participant drawings, and insights linking user preferences to existing guidelines.

Findings

Identified emergent categories of augmentations from user drawings

Created a repository of 364 hand-drawn augmentation examples

Provided insights into user considerations and existing design guidelines

Abstract

Visual augmentations are commonly added to charts and graphs in order to convey richer and more nuanced information about relationships in the data. However, many design spaces proposed for categorizing augmentations were defined in a top-down manner, based on expert heuristics or from surveys of published visualizations. Less well understood are user preferences and intuitions when designing augmentations. In this paper, we address the gap by conducting a design elicitation study, where study participants were asked to draw the different ways they would visually express the meaning of ten different prompts. We obtained 364 drawings from the study, and identified the emergent categories of augmentations used by participants. The contributions of this paper are: (i) a user-defined design space of visualization augmentations, (ii) a repository of hand drawn augmentations made by study participants, and (iii) a discussion of insights into participant considerations, and connections between our study and existing design guidelines.