Perspectives of Visualization Onboarding and Guidance in VA
This work tackles the problem of improving usability and accessibility of VA systems for domain experts, but it is incremental as it builds on existing approaches to user assistance.
The paper addresses the challenge of expert users lacking experience with Visual Analytics (VA) systems by proposing a conceptual model for integrating visualization onboarding and guidance to assist users in interpreting visual representations and closing knowledge gaps. It clarifies the differences between onboarding and guidance, and demonstrates how their integration with knowledge extraction and exploration can enhance VA tools' effectiveness and user acceptance.
A typical problem in Visual Analytics is that users are highly trained experts in their application domains, but have mostly no experience in using VA systems. Thus, users often have difficulties interpreting and working with visual representations. To overcome these problems, user assistance can be incorporated into VA systems to guide experts through the analysis while closing their knowledge gaps. Different types of user assistance can be applied to extend the power of VA, enhance the user's experience, and broaden the audience for VA. Although different approaches to visualization onboarding and guidance in VA already exist, there is a lack of research on how to design and integrate them in effective and efficient ways. Therefore, we aim at putting together the pieces of the mosaic to form a coherent whole. Based on the Knowledge-Assisted Visual Analytics model, we contribute a conceptual model of user assistance for VA by integrating the process of visualization onboarding and guidance as the two main approaches in this direction. As a result, we clarify and discuss the commonalities and differences between visualization onboarding and guidance, and discuss how they benefit from the integration of knowledge extraction and exploration. Finally, we discuss our descriptive model by applying it to VA tools integrating visualization onboarding and guidance, and showing how they should be utilized in different phases of the analysis in order to be effective and accepted by the user.