Project description

Organizations have to process and understand their internal data. In order to do so, many organizations use visualization tools to design graphs and tables. However, when actually designing these visualizations, often questions emerge: How should complex data be visualized to improve decision making? How can cognitive overload of the users be prevented? How flexible or interactive should self-service visualization options be?

In the Eurostars-project 'Dr. Tide: Digital Research Tailored Information Detector' it will be explored how internal business data should be visualized in cooperation with a German and a Norwegian company. For this purpose, visualization rules derived from the literature will be empirically tested on pilot users from one of the participating companies and on students. At the beginning of the project, the focus will be mainly on the design of static visualizations. Towards the end of the project, the focus will be on self-service visualizations. Self-service visualizations allow the users to expand the visualizations or to change the presentation format. Some important research issues in this project phase will be how interaction with visualizations affects the comprehension and confidence in the data and how it affects decision making. To explore the mentioned research issues, amongst other things, the user navigation behavior (e.g., with eye tracking) will be measured.

Publications

Kopp, T., Riekert, M., & Utz, S. (2018). When cognitive fit outweighs cognitive load: Redundant data labels in charts increase accuracy and speed of information extraction. Computers in Human Behavior, 86, 367-376. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.04.037.

Website

Project Website: Dr TIDE