You can't always sketch what you want: Understanding Sensemaking in Visual Query Systems
This addresses the adoption gap in visual query systems for domain experts in fields like astronomy and genetics, but it is incremental as it builds on prior work with user-centered design.
The study investigated why visual query systems (VQSs) are not widely adopted in practice, finding that sketch-only querying is less common than assumed because users struggle to precisely express patterns, and identified three essential sensemaking processes that vary by domain.
Visual query systems (VQSs) empower users to interactively search for line charts with desired visual patterns, typically specified using intuitive sketch-based interfaces. Despite decades of past work on VQSs, these efforts have not translated to adoption in practice, possibly because VQSs are largely evaluated in unrealistic lab-based settings. To remedy this gap in adoption, we collaborated with experts from three diverse domains---astronomy, genetics, and material science---via a year-long user-centered design process to develop a VQS that supports their workflow and analytical needs, and evaluate how VQSs can be used in practice. Our study results reveal that ad-hoc sketch-only querying is not as commonly used as prior work suggests, since analysts are often unable to precisely express their patterns of interest. In addition, we characterize three essential sensemaking processes supported by our enhanced VQS. We discover that participants employ all three processes, but in different proportions, depending on the analytical needs in each domain. Our findings suggest that all three sensemaking processes must be integrated in order to make future VQSs useful for a wide range of analytical inquiries.