Design Exposition Discussion Documents for Rich Design Discourse in Applied Visualization

Abstract

We present and report on Design Exposition Discussion Documents (DExDs), a new means of fostering collaboration between visualization designers and domain experts in applied visualization research. DExDs are a collection of semi-interactive web-based documents used to promote design discourse: to communicate new visualization designs, and their underlying rationale, and to elicit feedback and new design ideas. Developed and applied during a four-year visual data analysis project in criminal intelligence, these documents enabled a series of visualization redesigns to be explored by crime analysts remotely-in a flexible and authentic way. The DExDs were found to engender a level of engagement that is qualitatively distinct from more traditional methods of feedback elicitation, supporting the kind of informed, iterative and design-led feedback that is core to applied visualization research. They also offered a solution to limited and intermittent contact between analyst and visualization researcher and began to address more intractable deficiencies, such as social desirability-bias, common to applied visualization projects. Crucially, DExDs conferred to domain experts greater agency over the design process-collaborators proposed design suggestions, justified with design knowledge, that directly influenced the re-redesigns. We provide context that allows the contributions to be transferred to a range of settings.

On the Use of ‘Glyphmaps’ for Analysing the Scale and Temporal Spread of COVID-19 Reported Cases

“…As is often the case, increased data density results in problems of occlusion and clutter, particularly in this case where there is a requirement to represent multiple features of the case data (DatR2-DatR7) for local authorities with a geospatial arrangement (DatR1). We reflect on this and layout options which involve relaxing geography, overcoming the occlusion problems at the expense of geographic precision, demonstrating the kind of design exposition [30,31] that we use to guide our design process (Figure 2).…”

“…It is very difficult to establish empirically whether or not these sorts of overloaded views [42] can genuinely be perceived simultaneously (c.f. [31,44]). The 1D structure in the area-charts of daily cases data is in itself reasonably rich.…”

Distributed Synchronous Visualization Design: Challenges and Strategies

“…While the visualization literature includes many discussion about design [3,5,16,20,31,[37][38][39]41,42,51,61], the focus is on the design processes rather than the collaborative process. The collaborations discussed tend to focus on how visualization researchers collaborate in long-term projects with domain experts.…”

On the use of ‘glyphmaps’ for analysing Covid-19 reported cases

“…As is often the case, increased data density results in problems of occlusion and clutter, particularly in this case where there is a requirement to represent multiple features of the case data (DatR2-DatR7) for local authorities with a geospatial arrangement (DatR1). We reflect on this and layout options which involve relaxing geography, overcoming the occlusion problems at the expense of geographic precision-demonstrating the kind of design exposition (Wood et al, 2018;Beecham et al, 2020) that we use to guide our design process. Munzner (2014), visual channels through which data can be encoded, ordered according to effectiveness.…”

“…and Fekete, 2010) can genuinely be perceived simultaneously (c.f. Beecham et al, 2016Beecham et al, , 2020. The 1D structure in the area-charts of daily cases data is in itself reasonably rich.…”