Understanding User Experience of COVID-19 Maps through Remote Elicitation Interviews
This addresses the need for refined remote evaluation methods for public health visualizations during a pandemic, but it is incremental as it builds upon existing micro-phenomenology studies.
The study tackled the problem of evaluating user experience for COVID-19 maps in remote settings by conducting elicitation interviews, finding both positive and negative aspects that inform planning and execution of such remote evaluations.
During the coronavirus pandemic, visualizations gained a new level of popularity and meaning for a wider audience. People were bombarded with a wide set of public health visualizations ranging from simple graphs to complex interactive dashboards. In a pandemic setting, where large amounts of the world population are socially distancing themselves, it becomes an urgent need to refine existing user experience evaluation methods for remote settings to understand how people make sense out of COVID-19 related visualizations. When evaluating visualizations aimed towards the general public with vastly different socio-demographic backgrounds and varying levels of technical savviness and data literacy, it is important to understand user feedback beyond aspects such as speed, task accuracy, or usability problems. As a part of this wider evaluation perspective, micro-phenomenology has been used to evaluate static and narrative visualizations to reveal the lived experience in a detailed way. Building upon these studies, we conducted a user study to understand how to employ Elicitation (aka Micro-phenomenological) interviews in remote settings. In a case study, we investigated what experiences the participants had with map-based interactive visualizations. Our findings reveal positive and negative aspects of conducting Elicitation interviews remotely. Our results can inform the process of planning and executing remote Elicitation interviews to evaluate interactive visualizations. In addition, we share recommendations regarding visualization techniques and interaction design about public health data.