Information visualisation literacy assessment to aid design of visualisation tools for novice users
Lead Research Organisation:
University College London
Department Name: Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis
Abstract
The project is concerned with the study of visualisation literacy. Visualisation literacy is defined as the ability and skill to read and interpret visually represented data in and to extract information from data visualisations. As data is increasingly used to inform decisions in many different fields and make sense of the world around us, the ability to interpret data sets and understand their contents is increasingly becoming of an essential to navigating our work and personal lives. To work with data an individual needs the technologic, technical and conceptual under- standing to engage with datasets to convert their content into meaningful information. Information visualisation offerings a powerful means of understanding data. The power of visualisation lies in its ability to augment humans strong visual skills through exploiting the cognitive and perceptual traits that allow people to detect features such as patterns, trends, outliers and clusters in a dataset.
As visualisations are based on augmenting human visual skills, it is essential to design visualisation systems from the perspective of a user. Not all users are the same; there are different levels of ability to use visualisations. This skill is visualisation literacy. If a user cannot confidently use visualisation to understand the information represented, the visualisation does not work and denies an individual the ability to participate in our increasingly data-driven world. We risk increasing the digital divide already evident in our society. Therefore, it is essential to that information visualisation literacy into account in to ensure users can successfully understand data.
This research aims to improve information visualisation literacy assessment. In recent years visualisation literacy has begun to pay attention to visualisation literacy and means assessing users have been developed. However, These methods are focused on the identification of an individual visualisation literacy level; they do not explore the role that visualisation types, datasets and the tasks the user performs as they interpret a visualisation.
This research aims to build on previous research to develop means of assessment that capture the role of visualisation types, datasets and tasks play in visualisation literacy, building a means of assessment that can be integrated with contemporary visualisation design practices. Using these findings to develop an assessment that can be deployed alongside a visualisation tool to aid training the user and the assessment of the role of subject matter in understanding a visualisation. These methods will be applied to aid the deployment of visualisation tools developed by I-sense for health workers with a lack of technical experience in lower and middle income countries.
As visualisations are based on augmenting human visual skills, it is essential to design visualisation systems from the perspective of a user. Not all users are the same; there are different levels of ability to use visualisations. This skill is visualisation literacy. If a user cannot confidently use visualisation to understand the information represented, the visualisation does not work and denies an individual the ability to participate in our increasingly data-driven world. We risk increasing the digital divide already evident in our society. Therefore, it is essential to that information visualisation literacy into account in to ensure users can successfully understand data.
This research aims to improve information visualisation literacy assessment. In recent years visualisation literacy has begun to pay attention to visualisation literacy and means assessing users have been developed. However, These methods are focused on the identification of an individual visualisation literacy level; they do not explore the role that visualisation types, datasets and the tasks the user performs as they interpret a visualisation.
This research aims to build on previous research to develop means of assessment that capture the role of visualisation types, datasets and tasks play in visualisation literacy, building a means of assessment that can be integrated with contemporary visualisation design practices. Using these findings to develop an assessment that can be deployed alongside a visualisation tool to aid training the user and the assessment of the role of subject matter in understanding a visualisation. These methods will be applied to aid the deployment of visualisation tools developed by I-sense for health workers with a lack of technical experience in lower and middle income countries.
Organisations
Studentship Projects
| Project Reference | Relationship | Related To | Start | End | Student Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EP/N509577/1 | 01/10/2016 | 24/03/2022 | |||
| 1874173 | Studentship | EP/N509577/1 | 26/04/2017 | 25/04/2023 | David Concannon |
| Description | The key findings from this award thus far are as follows. The evaluation of the useability of a dashboard to share findings from a population health research site in South Africa produced results that showed a significant difference between user groups. The evaluation participants were drawn from a diverse group of users working at the site (n=20), comprising of community members, nurses, scientific and operational staff. The evaluation demonstrated high usability for the dashboard across user groups, with scientific and operational staff having minimal issues in completing tasks. There were notable differences in the efficiency of task completion among user groups, indicating varying familiarity with data visualisation(visualisation literacy) The majority of users felt that the dashboards provided a clear understanding of the datasets presented and had a positive attitude to their increased use. Especially among the community members who are the primary participants of the research, the centre undertakes-highlighting how visualisation could be used to engage participants and provide a means for them to understand how their data is used. These findings highlight the challenges of developing tools to share health information among diverse user groups, with differing levels of technical ability and different needs from a visualisation tool. Following these insights, an assessment of visualisation literacy was developed to investigate further the different experiences of users with a background in STEM subjects and those who do not. Much has been done on the perceptual effectiveness of charts types and their uses (E.g How a bar chart is more effective than a pie when comparing areas. There is less research into how groups of different experience with data perform with the same stimuli. The assessment was deployed as an online questionnaire. The assessment consisted of the participant completing information-seeking tasks on 12 chart types. Initial findings indicate that there is a significant difference in how participants from STEM and non-STEM backgrounds can successfully use different chart types. STEM participants performing better in the assessment overall, highlighting that different means of displaying information could benefit a specific user group These findings are preliminary; further, investigation and additional data are required to explore how they can best be employed to improve the design of visualisation tools. |
| Exploitation Route | The initial findings from this project have shown how participants from different backgrounds understand information visualisation differently. This project provides a new means of assessment to gauge potential users abilities. The future outcomes could be used to provide guidelines on are the most effective visualisations depending on the visualisation literacy of the user. The results of this award could be helpful when designing visualisation systems that have diverse backgrounds, as is often the case in healthcare. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Healthcare |
| Description | Africa Health Research Intitiute Weekly semainer |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | talk at the Africa Health Institute about the use of data dashboards in population health and the need to design for different users |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017,2018 |
| Description | Digital health and technology show |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Industry/Business |
| Results and Impact | Demonstration of I-sense dashboards at digital health shows, interest in dashboards. Conversations with audience members regarding the use of visualisation to track outbreaks.A number of conversations asking for further information |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | ESPRC Royal society demostration |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Policymakers/politicians |
| Results and Impact | Demonstration of I-sense dashboards at an event for ESPRC members. Great interest in dashboards. Many conversations with the audience asking for further information and the dashboards and the design for all users were featured on the ESPRC twitter account that day |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | I-sense Biannual presentations |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Policymakers/politicians |
| Results and Impact | twice-yearly presentation to share how my research is progressing and talk about the place of information visualisation and dashboards within I-sense project |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017,2018,2019,2020 |
| Description | IEEE VIS 2018 Doctoral colloquium presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Presentation on my PhD at the conference. Received feedback on the subject that have been incorporated into the project |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| Description | mAfrica workshop Durban |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Talk at the mAfrica workshop on the place of visualisation as an important component of the mHealth workflow and how we must design for all users |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |