"Many At Once: Capturing Intentions to Create And Use Many Views At Once In Large Display Environments"

Many At Once: Capturing Intentions to Create And Use Many Views At Once In Large Display Environments

Aurisano, J., Kumar, A., Alsaiari, A., Di Eugenio, B., Johnson, A.E.

A participant generates 15 views of her data. In the final request, the participant references a set of three views and poses a request to copy and pivot these views collectively to four new subsets of the data. The final result is a grid of views.

This paper describes results from an observational, exploratory study of visual data exploration in a large, multi-view, flexible canvas environment. Participants were provided with a set of data exploration sub-tasks associated with a local crime dataset and were instructed to pose questions to a remote mediator who would respond by generating and organizing visualizations on the large display. We observed that participants frequently posed requests to cast a net around one or several subsets of the data or a set of data attributes. They accomplished this directly and by utilizing existing views in unique ways, including by requesting to copy and pivot a group of views collectively and posing a set of parallel requests on target views expressed in one command. These observed actions depart from multi-view flexible canvas environments that typically provide interfaces in support of generating one view at a time or actions that operate on one view at a time. We describe how participants used these “cast-a-net” requests for tasks that spanned more than one view and describe design considerations for multi-view environments that would support the observed multi-view generation actions.

Index Terms: Human-centered computing - Empirical studies in visualization

This work was supported initially by NSF award IIS 1445751 and currently by NSF award CNS 1625941.

https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.13976