Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Useful Defaults:
Novice users likely will not spend time tuning an ugly looking
visualization to fit their needs. It is therefore important to provide a set of
sensible defaults for data and view parameters (such as scales, colors, item sizes
and viewpoints) to help constrain the parameter space that users have to explore.
Multiple combinations of these parameters can be offered by providing a preset
list. As an added bonus, a good set of presets can show users what is possible
and educate them on what is sensible.
Contextual Information:
With contextual information we mean visual items that
explain to the user what data is being mapped to the screen and what encod-
ings are being applied. This involves legends, scales, labels, pop-ups, titles and
explanations of visual mappings. Although visual graphics in print media take
great care to provide contextual information, interactive visualizations are often
lacking in this respect because most of the design attention is focused on the
visual mapping itself.
Savvy Users:
By savvy users we mean people who have experience performing
relatively sophisticated data organization and manipulation, using a combination
of manual processing and limited amounts of programming or scripting. Because
savvy users are a small but non-trivial part of the population of visualization
consumers, they are a critical bridge between experts and novices. As such, savvy
visualization users may act variously as:
-
experts
who train or guide novice users in the use of particular visualizations
by clarifying exploratory and analytic functionality in terms of interface
appearance and behavior,
-
designers
who plan, construct, debug, test, and deploy new visualizations
for ongoing evaluation and routine operation by novice users,
-
end-users
who can bring more extensive experience to bear when using ex-
isting visualizations to analyze data from their own knowledge domains, to
browse data with which they are less familiar, and to share their results with
others, and
-
explorers
(or
user-designers
) who combine the roles of designer and end-user
by extending and redesigning visualizations on the fly during open-ended
exploration of their data.
Expert Users:
By expert users we mean people who have extensive experience
with interactive graphical software development and the theory and applica-
tion of data modeling, data processing, and visual data representation. As such,
visualization experts may act both as:
-
researchers
who invent, specify, and evaluate methods for accessing, query-
ing, rendering, and interacting with data, often with an eye toward extending
and enhancing the functionality of existing visualization systems and tools,
and
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