Drillboards: Adaptive Visualization Dashboards for Dynamic Personalization of Visualization Experiences

TL;DR

This paper introduces drillboards, an adaptive dashboard technique enabling users to personalize visualization experiences through hierarchical, drill-down charts tailored to their expertise and interests.

Contribution

The paper presents a formal framework and an authoring tool for creating personalized, hierarchical dashboards that adapt to user needs and expertise.

Findings

Experts successfully authored personalized drillboards.

End-users experienced improved engagement with personalized dashboards.

The approach effectively merges diverse chart types into cohesive representations.

Abstract

We present drillboards, a technique for adaptive visualization dashboards consisting of a hierarchy of coordinated charts that the user can drill down to reach a desired level of detail depending on their expertise, interest, and desired effort. This functionality allows different users to personalize the same dashboard to their specific needs and expertise. The technique is based on a formal vocabulary of chart representations and rules for merging multiple charts of different types and data into single composite representations. The drillboard hierarchy is created by iteratively applying these rules starting from a baseline dashboard, with each consecutive operation yielding a new dashboard with fewer charts and progressively more abstract and simplified views. We also present an authoring tool for building drillboards and show how experts users can use to build up and deliver personalized experiences to a wide audience. Our evaluation asked three domain experts to author drillboards for their own datasets, which we then showed to casual end-users with favorable outcomes.