A taxonomy of tasks for guiding the evaluation of multidimensional visualizations

Abstract

The design of multidimensional visualization techniques is based on the assumption that a graphical representation of a large dataset can give more insight to a user, by providing him/her a more intuitive support in the process of exploiting data. When developing a visualization technique, the analytic and exploratory tasks that a user might need or want to perform on the data should guide the choice of the visual and interaction metaphors implemented by the technique. Usability testing of visualization techniques also needs the definition of users' tasks. The identification and understanding of the nature of the users' tasks in the process of acquiring knowledge from visual representations of data is a recent branch in information visualization research. Some works have proposed taxonomies to organize tasks that a visualization technique should support. This paper proposes a taxonomy of visualization tasks, based on existing taxonomies as well as on the observation of users performing exploratory tasks in a multidimensional data set using two different visualization techniques, Parallel Coordinates and RadViz. Different scenarios involving low-level tasks were estimated for the completion of some high-level tasks, and they were compared to the scenarios observed during the users' experiments.

Crowdsourcing for Information Visualization: Promises and Pitfalls

“…Many taxonomies have been suggested to organize tasks performed by participants, working with visualizations (e.g., [93,8,61,96,21]). The purpose of these taxonomies is to support visualization experts in creating the visualization design and to support the evaluation of visualizations.…”

Tasks for Multivariate Network Analysis

“…The work by Valiati et al addresses such difficulties by distinguishing three broad classes of tasks [12]: operational (relating to the means by which the network is presented and explored), analytical (the means by which information is extracted from the network), and cognitive (facilitating understanding of the whole network). Each category comprises one or more tasks.…”

“…For this, they originally used the elementary tasks proposed by Amar et al [6]. However, we employ the tasks described in the previous section, as proposed by Valiati et al [12], because they address some of the shortcomings of other general task taxonomies (as highlighted in the previous section). We make one exception to the approach of composing network tasks from more general tasks, however.…”

“…We use the term "estimation" (rather than "overview") to emphasise that these tasks are not easily definable in terms of lower-level tasks (as per the Lee et al definition [7]), but are high-level, with the objective of gaining a rough estimation rather than precise answers. In this sense, there is also a clear link with the "cognitive" ("infer") task category of Valiati et al [12], although Valiati et al, like Lee et al, suggest that these tasks can be systematically decomposed into sequences of sub-tasks.…”

Mapping the Users’ Problem Solving Strategies in the Participatory Design of Visual Analytics Methods

“…Typical locating-(e.g., finding a date) or identifying-tasks (e.g., finding the maximum) [20] can be associated with such kind of problems. In contrast, illdefined problems have more than one solution and often include only fragmentary information.…”