Accounting for Availability Biases in Information Visualization
This work addresses decision-making biases for users of information visualization tools, but it is incremental as it builds on existing heuristics without introducing a new method.
The paper tackles the problem of availability biases in decision-making by proposing three ways visualizations can facilitate unbiased decisions, such as altering memory storage for better long-term intuitions and suggesting intuitive approximations instead of exhaustive comparisons.
The availability heuristic is a strategy that people use to make quick decisions but often lead to systematic errors. We propose three ways that visualization could facilitate unbiased decision-making. First, visualizations can alter the way our memory stores the events for later recall, so as to improve users' long-term intuitions. Second, the known biases could lead to new visualization guidelines. Third, we suggest the design of decision-making tools that are inspired by heuristics, e.g. suggesting intuitive approximations, rather than target to present exhaustive comparisons of all possible outcomes, or automated solutions for choosing decisions.