Touching Data: A Discoverability-based Evaluation of a Visualization Interface for Tablet Computers
This work addresses the problem of evaluating initial usability for mobile visualization systems, which is incremental as it builds on existing methods by focusing on discoverability.
The authors tackled the lack of evaluation for touch-based visualization systems by conducting a discoverability-based user study comparing their tablet system Tangere to Tableau's Vizable, identifying design principles for future systems.
While a number of touch-based visualization systems have appeared in recent years, relatively little work has been done to evaluate these systems. The prevailing methods compare these systems to desktop-class applications or utilize traditional training-based usability studies. We argue that existing studies, while useful, fail to address a key aspect of mobile application usage - initial impression and discoverability-driven usability. Over the past few years, we have developed a tablet-based visualization system, Tangere, for analyzing tabular data in a multiple coordinated view configuration. This article describes a discoverability-based user study of Tangere in which the system is compared to a commercially available visualization system for tablets - Tableau's Vizable. The study highlights aspects of each system's design that resonate with study participants, and we reflect upon those findings to identify design principles for future tablet-based data visualization systems.