Collaborative Research: HCC: Medium: Design guidelines for dynamic visualizations

在新闻、教育、商业和安全等领域，人们依靠可视化来理解和交流数据中的模式、图表中的流程或地图中的路线。这些可视化越来越动态，使用移动对象或动画模式来显示数据中的趋势和交互。在许多情况下，这些动态显示可以帮助人们理解这些关系，但在某些情况下，这些动态元素可能会让人不知所措，或者导致他们得出错误的结论。在所有这些领域，即使是专业设计师也很难预测哪些显示器会起作用。通过基于心理学的实验和对专家可视化设计师的采访，本项目将探索动态可视化的力量和局限性。这将产生一套指导方针，使来自不同背景和经验水平的设计师能够创建更有效的展示，从而更好地理解、教育和决策。为了了解人们如何处理和解释这些动态展示，调查人员将通过采访数据展示的设计者并验证他们的设计达到其所述目标的程度，对跨数据展示的动画的预期用途的抽象集合进行分类(例如，跟踪图表中的轴变化的值)。在与这些设计师的合作下，研究团队将对人类视觉系统处理预期图案的能力和局限性进行一系列实证测试，并进行一系列初步实验，以测试动态可视化的能力，以支持观众查看统计数据、进行比较、跟踪对象和吸引注意力。研究人员将利用这些发现来生成一份实践者指南，以设计针对共同目标的有效展示。在与我们的设计师和顾问团队的持续磋商中，调查人员将纳入他们对以下方面的反馈：(A)我们抽象的展示、任务和措施是否仍然与他们的背景案例研究相关，以及(B)我们的从业人员指南是否与他们的期望一致，并捕获应在大多数案例研究上下文中概括的规则。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

People rely on visualizations to understand and communicate patterns in data, processes in diagrams, or routes within maps, in domains including journalism, education, business, and security. These visualizations are increasingly dynamic, using moving objects or animated patterns to show trends and interactions in the data. In many cases these dynamic displays can help people understand these relationships, but in some cases these dynamic elements can overwhelm people or lead them to incorrect conclusions. Across all of these domains, even expert designers have trouble predicting which displays will work. Through psychology-based experiments and interviews with expert visualization designers, this project will explore the power and limits of dynamic visualization. It will result in a set of guidelines that will enable designers from diverse backgrounds and levels of experience to create more effective displays that lead to better understanding, education, and decisions.To understand how people process and interpret these dynamic displays, the investigators will catalog an abstracted set of intended uses for animation across data displays (e.g., track a value across an axis change in a graph) by interviewing designers of data displays and validating how well their designs meet their stated goals. In collaboration with these designers, the research team will conduct a series of empirical tests of the power and limits of the human visual system to process the intended patterns, with an initial set of experiments that will test the ability of dynamic visualizations to support viewers in seeing statistics, making comparisons, tracking objects, and drawing attention. The investigators will use these findings to generate a practitioner’s guide for designing effective displays for common goals. In ongoing consultations with our team of designers and advisors, the investigators will incorporate their feedback about (a) whether our abstracted displays, tasks, and measures remain relevant to their in-context case studies, and (b) whether our practitioner’s guide is consistent with their expectations and captures rules that should generalize across most case-study contexts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.