Matthew Brehmer

Matthew Brehmer, Maxime Cordeil, Christophe Hurter et al.

We characterize 16 challenges faced by those investigating and developing remote and synchronous collaborative experiences around visualization. Our work reflects the perspectives and prior research efforts of an international group of 29 experts from across human-computer interaction and visualization sub-communities. The challenges are anchored around five collaborative activities that exhibit a centrality of visualization and multimodal communication. These activities include exploratory data analysis, creative ideation, visualization-rich presentations, joint decision making grounded in data, and real-time data monitoring. The challenges also reflect the changing dynamics of these activities in the face of recent advances in extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI). As an organizing scheme for future research at the intersection of visualization and computer-supported cooperative work, we align the challenges with a sequence of four sets of research and development activities: technological choices, social factors, AI assistance, and evaluation.

Dion Barja, Matthew Brehmer

Videoconference conversations about data often entail screen sharing visualization artifacts, in which nonverbal communication goes largely ignored. Beyond presentation use cases, conversations supported by visualization also arise in collaborative decision making, technical interviews, and tutoring: use cases that benefit from participants being able to see one another as they exchange questions about the data. In this paper, we employ a reciprocal compositing of visualization and interface widgets over the mirrored video of one's conversation partner, suggestive of a pane of glass, in which both parties can simultaneously manipulate composited elements via bimanual gestures. We demonstrate our approach with implementations of several visualization interfaces spanning the aforementioned use cases, and we evaluate our approach in a study (N = 16) comparing it to videoconferencing while using a mouse to interact with a collaborative web application. Our findings suggest that our approach promotes feelings of presence and mutual awareness of analytical intent.

Mohammad Abolnejadian, Shakiba Amirshahi, Matthew Brehmer et al.

In decision-making conversations, experts must navigate complex choices and make on-the-spot decisions while engaged in conversation. Although extensive historical data often exists, the real-time nature of these scenarios makes it infeasible for decision-makers to review and leverage relevant information. This raises an interesting question: What if experts could utilize relevant past data in real-time decision-making through insights derived from past data? To explore this, we implemented a conversational user interface, taking doctor-patient interactions as an example use case. Our system continuously listens to the conversation, identifies patient problems and doctor-suggested solutions, and retrieves related data from an embedded dataset, generating concise insights using a pipeline built around a retrieval-based Large Language Model (LLM) agent. We evaluated the prototype by embedding Health Canada datasets into a vector database and conducting simulated studies using sample doctor-patient dialogues, showing effectiveness but also challenges, setting directions for the next steps of our work.

Matthew Brehmer, Robert Kosara

Prior research on communicating with visualization has focused on public presentation and asynchronous individual consumption, such as in the domain of journalism. The visualization research community knows comparatively little about synchronous and multimodal communication around data within organizations, from team meetings to executive briefings. We conducted two qualitative interview studies with individuals who prepare and deliver presentations about data to audiences in organizations. In contrast to prior work, we did not limit our interviews to those who self-identify as data analysts or data scientists. Both studies examined aspects of speaking about data with visual aids such as charts, dashboards, and tables. One study was a retrospective examination of current practices and difficulties, from which we identified three scenarios involving presentations of data. We describe these scenarios using an analogy to musical performance: small collaborative team meetings are akin to jam session, while more structured presentations can range from semi-improvisational performances among peers to formal recitals given to executives or customers. In our second study, we grounded the discussion around three design probes, each examining a different aspect of presenting data: the progressive reveal of visualization to direct attention and advance a narrative, visualization presentation controls that are hidden from the audience's view, and the coordination of a presenter's video with interactive visualization. Our distillation of interviewees' responses surfaced twelve themes, from ways of authoring presentations to creating accessible and engaging audience experiences.

Matthew Brehmer, Robert Kosara, Carmen Hull

We introduce Diatoms, a technique that generates design inspiration for glyphs by sampling from palettes of mark shapes, encoding channels, and glyph scaffold shapes. Diatoms allows for a degree of randomness while respecting constraints imposed by columns in a data table: their data types and domains as well as semantic associations between columns as specified by the designer. We pair this generative design process with two forms of interactive design externalization that enable comparison and critique of the design alternatives. First, we incorporate a familiar small multiples configuration in which every data point is drawn according to a single glyph design, coupled with the ability to page between alternative glyph designs. Second, we propose a small permutables design gallery, in which a single data point is drawn according to each alternative glyph design, coupled with the ability to page between data points. We demonstrate an implementation of our technique as an extension to Tableau featuring three example palettes, and to better understand how Diatoms could fit into existing design workflows, we conducted interviews and chauffeured demos with 12 designers. Finally, we reflect on our process and the designers' reactions, discussing the potential of our technique in the context of visualization authoring systems. Ultimately, our approach to glyph design and comparison can kickstart and inspire visualization design, allowing for the serendipitous discovery of shape and channel combinations that would have otherwise been overlooked.

Mai Elshehaly, Rebecca Randell, Matthew Brehmer et al.

Adapting dashboard design to different contexts of use is an open question in visualisation research. Dashboard designers often seek to strike a balance between dashboard adaptability and ease-of-use, and in hospitals challenges arise from the vast diversity of key metrics, data models and users involved at different organizational levels. In this design study, we present QualDash, a dashboard generation engine that allows for the dynamic configuration and deployment of visualisation dashboards for healthcare quality improvement (QI). We present a rigorous task analysis based on interviews with healthcare professionals, a co-design workshop and a series of one-on-one meetings with front line analysts. From these activities we define a metric card metaphor as a unit of visual analysis in healthcare QI, using this concept as a building block for generating highly adaptable dashboards, and leading to the design of a Metric Specification Structure (MSS). Each MSS is a JSON structure which enables dashboard authors to concisely configure unit-specific variants of a metric card, while offloading common patterns that are shared across cards to be preset by the engine. We reflect on deploying and iterating the design of QualDash in cardiology wards and pediatric intensive care units of five NHS hospitals. Finally, we report evaluation results that demonstrate the adaptability, ease-of-use and usefulness of QualDash in a real-world scenario.

Hwiyeon Kim, Juyoung Oh, Yunha Han et al.

When people browse online news, small thumbnail images accompanying links to articles attract their attention and help them to decide which articles to read. As an increasing proportion of online news can be construed as data journalism, we have witnessed a corresponding increase in the incorporation of visualization in article thumbnails. However, there is little research to support alternative design choices for visualization thumbnails, which include resizing, cropping, simplifying, and embellishing charts appearing within the body of the associated article. We therefore sought to better understand these design choices and determine what makes a visualization thumbnail inviting and interpretable. This paper presents our findings from a survey of visualization thumbnails collected online and from conversations with data journalists and news graphics designers. Our study reveals that there exists an uncharted design space, one that is in need of further empirical study. Our work can thus be seen as a first step toward providing structured guidance on how to design thumbnails for data stories.

Arvind Satyanarayan, Bongshin Lee, Donghao Ren et al.

An emerging generation of visualization authoring systems support expressive information visualization without textual programming. As they vary in their visualization models, system architectures, and user interfaces, it is challenging to directly compare these systems using traditional evaluative methods. Recognizing the value of contextualizing our decisions in the broader design space, we present critical reflections on three systems we developed -- Lyra, Data Illustrator, and Charticulator. This paper surfaces knowledge that would have been daunting within the constituent papers of these three systems. We compare and contrast their (previously unmentioned) limitations and trade-offs between expressivity and learnability. We also reflect on common assumptions that we made during the development of our systems, thereby informing future research directions in visualization authoring systems.

Matthew Brehmer, Bongshin Lee, Petra Isenberg et al.

We compare the efficacy of animated and small multiples variants of scatterplots on mobile phones for comparing trends in multivariate datasets. Visualization is increasingly prevalent in mobile applications and mobile-first websites, yet there is little prior visualization research dedicated to small displays. In this paper, we build upon previous experimental research carried out on larger displays that assessed animated and non-animated variants of scatterplots. Incorporating similar experimental stimuli and tasks, we conducted an experiment where 96 crowdworker participants performed nine trend comparison tasks using their mobile phones. We found that those using a small multiples design consistently completed tasks in less time, albeit with slightly less confidence than those using an animated design. The accuracy results were more task-dependent, and we further interpret our results according to the characteristics of the individual tasks, with a specific focus on the trajectories of target and distractor data items in each task. We identify cases that appear to favor either animation or small multiples, providing new questions for further experimental research and implications for visualization design on mobile devices. Lastly, we provide a reflection on our evaluation methodology.