Information visualisation literacy assessment to aid design of visualisation tools for novice users

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The project is concerned with the study of visualisation literacy. Visualisation literacy is defined as the ability and skill to read and interpret visually represented data in and to extract information from data visualisations. As data is increasingly used to inform decisions in many different fields and make sense of the world around us, the ability to interpret data sets and understand their contents is increasingly becoming of an essential to navigating our work and personal lives. To work with data an individual needs the technologic, technical and conceptual under- standing to engage with datasets to convert their content into meaningful information. Information visualisation offerings a powerful means of understanding data. The power of visualisation lies in its ability to augment humans strong visual skills through exploiting the cognitive and perceptual traits that allow people to detect features such as patterns, trends, outliers and clusters in a dataset.As visualisations are based on augmenting human visual skills, it is essential to design visualisation systems from the perspective of a user. Not all users are the same; there are different levels of ability to use visualisations. This skill is visualisation literacy. If a user cannot confidently use visualisation to understand the information represented, the visualisation does not work and denies an individual the ability to participate in our increasingly data-driven world. We risk increasing the digital divide already evident in our society. Therefore, it is essential to that information visualisation literacy into account in to ensure users can successfully understand data.This research aims to improve information visualisation literacy assessment. In recent years visualisation literacy has begun to pay attention to visualisation literacy and means assessing users have been developed. However, These methods are focused on the identification of an individual visualisation literacy level; they do not explore the role that visualisation types, datasets and the tasks the user performs as they interpret a visualisation.This research aims to build on previous research to develop means of assessment that capture the role of visualisation types, datasets and tasks play in visualisation literacy, building a means of assessment that can be integrated with contemporary visualisation design practices. Using these findings to develop an assessment that can be deployed alongside a visualisation tool to aid training the user and the assessment of the role of subject matter in understanding a visualisation. These methods will be applied to aid the deployment of visualisation tools developed by I-sense for health workers with a lack of technical experience in lower and middle income countries.