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visualizations already enjoy game-like properties, being highly visual, highly in-
teractive, and often animated. Heer [42] discusses various examples in which
playful activity contributes to analysis, applying insights from an existing the-
ory of playful behavior [16] that analyzes the competitive, visceral, and teamwork
building aspects of play. For example, scoring mechanisms could be applied to
create competitive social-psychological incentives. Game design might also be
used to allocate attention, for example, by creating a team-oriented “scavenger
hunt” analysis game focused on a particular subject matter. Salen and Zim-
merman [78] provide a thorough resource for the further study of game design
concepts.
Coordination and Awareness:
An important aspect of collaborative action
is awareness of others' activities, allowing collaborators to gauge what work has
been done and where to allocate effort next [29,19]. Within asynchronous con-
texts, participants require awareness of the timing and content of past actions.
This suggests that designs should include both history and notification mecha-
nisms (e. g. [15]) for following actions performed on a given artifact or by specific
individuals or groups. Browseable histories of past action are one viable mech-
anism, as are subscription and notification technologies such as RSS (Really
Simple Syndication).
User activity can also be aggregated and abstracted to provide additional
forms of awareness. Social navigation [30] involves the use of activity traces to
provide additional navigation options, allowing users to purposefully navigate
to past states of high interest or explore less-visited regions (the “anti-social
navigation” of Wattenberg & Kriss [100]). For example, navigation cues may be
added to links to views with low visitation rates or to action items such as unan-
swered questions and unassessed hypotheses. One recent study [106] provides
evidence that social navigation cues can simultaneously promote revisitation of
popular or controversial views while also leading to a higher rate of unique dis-
coveries. Future research is needed to further develop and evaluate other forms
of awareness cues for supporting collaborative analysis.
Pointing and Reference:
When collaborating around visual media, it is com-
mon for one to refer to visible objects, groups, or regions [26,12]. Such references
may be general (“north by northwest”), definite (named entities), detailed (de-
scribed by attributes, such as the “blue ball”), or deictic (pointing to an object
and saying “that one”). Hill and Hollan [47] discuss the various roles that deictic
pointing gestures can play, often communicating intents more complicated than
simply “look here”. For example, different hand gestures can communicate angle
(oriented flat hand), intervals (thumb and index finger in “C” shape), groupings
(lasso'ing a region), and forces (accelerating fist). While other forms of reference
are often most easily achieved through speech or written text, deictic reference
in particular offers important interface design challenges for collaborative visu-
alization. Nuanced pointing behaviors can improve collaboration by making it
easier to establish the object of conversation. Hill and Hollan argue for “gener-
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