A User-centered Design Study in Scientific Visualization Targeting Domain Experts
This work addresses the problem of ensuring adoption and effectiveness of scientific visualizations for domain experts, but it is incremental as it applies established user-centered design principles to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the challenge of creating usable visualization solutions for domain experts by applying user-centered design principles in a two-year collaboration with combustion scientists, resulting in an in situ visualization technique and a post hoc probability distribution function exploration tool.
The development and design of visualization solutions that are truly usable is essential for ensuring both their adoption and effectiveness. User-centered design principles, which focus on involving users throughout the entire development process, are well suited for visualization and have been shown to be effective in numerous information visualization endeavors. In this paper, we report a two year long collaboration with combustion scientists that, by applying these design principles, generated multiple results including an in situ visualization technique and a post hoc probability distribution function (PDF) exploration tool. Furthermore, we examine the importance of user-centered design principles and describe lessons learned over the design process in an effort to aid others who also seek to work with scientists for developing effective and usable scientific visualization solutions.