Data Changes Everything: Challenges and Opportunities in Data Visualization Design Handoff

Abstract

Complex data visualization design projects often entail collaboration between people with different visualization-related skills. For example, many teams include both designers who create new visualization designs and developers who implement the resulting visualization software. We identify gaps between data characterization tools, visualization design tools, and development platforms that pose challenges for designer-developer teams working to create new data visualizations. While it is common for commercial interaction design tools to support collaboration between designers and developers, creating data visualizations poses several unique challenges that are not supported by current tools. In particular, visualization designers must characterize and build an understanding of the underlying data, then specify layouts, data encodings, and other data-driven parameters that will be robust across many different data values. In larger teams, designers must also clearly communicate these mappings and their dependencies to developers, clients, and other collaborators. We report observations and reflections from five large multidisciplinary visualization design projects and highlight six data-specific visualization challenges for design specification and handoff. These challenges include adapting to changing data, anticipating edge cases in data, understanding technical challenges, articulating data-dependent interactions, communicating data mappings, and preserving the integrity of data mappings across iterations. Based on these observations, we identify opportunities for future tools for prototyping, testing, and communicating data-driven designs, which might contribute to more successful and collaborative data visualization design.

Design Exposition Discussion Documents for Rich Design Discourse in Applied Visualization

“…• DExD as handoff document -communication with developers, where rather than justifying designs, essential behaviours are described and demonstrated explicitly in a structured way, rather than implied in a software prototype [20]. Such documents could address a key issue in handoff that is inadequately supported in existing design tools -the specification of data mappings and behaviours [20].…”

“…• DExD for data threats -communication with data owners, where design exposition and dialogue focuses specifically on likely edge-cases [20], perhaps requiring that designs are tested with alternative datasets to anticipate the effects of possible updates or for visual-data correspondence [32].…”

“…Since this work, other means of closely linking visualization and analytic or design commentary have emerged (e.g. [18], [19]) and the importance of doing so in large scale visualization development projects has been established [20]. DExDs represent one class of this activity.…”

“…A key characteristic of DExDs is that they embrace real data analysis scenarios, with an emphasis on documenting design candidates using real data and in familiar contexts. We have yet to find an example of such interactive documents being used to articulate design ideas to domain experts during the visualization design stage [20] of an applied project, where both design rationale and new designs can be communicated in a way that allows analysts to explore alternatives in their own time and a familiar setting. DExDs can be considered as "new tools that allow designers to more expressively prototype and test potential interactions" deemed crucial by Walny et al [20] during early-stage design.…”

Distributed Synchronous Visualization Design: Challenges and Strategies

“…Also there are suggestions of potentially useful concrete design activities (for example: those based on constructive visualization [26], those conducted as speculative design workshops [8,30], and the use of pencil-and-paper based sketching of data visualizations [62]). There is also advice on how to structure design processes, for example, how to teach visualization design to computer science students using five design sheet method [48]), and how to more clearly communicate visualization designs (for example, in designers communicating visualization designs to developers as part of a hand-off process [61]). These are all extremely informative when at least some of the activities can happen co-located, however, they are less applicable for synchronous distributed design activities.…”