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Beyond Usability and Performance: A Review of User Experience-focused Evaluations in Visualization

Published: 24 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Traditionally, studies of data visualization techniques and systems have evaluated visualizations with respect to usability goals such as effectiveness and efficiency. These studies assess performance-related metrics such as time and correctness of participants completing analytic tasks. Alternatively, several studies in InfoVis recently have evaluated visualizations by investigating user experience goals such as memorability, engagement, enjoyment and fun. These studies employ somewhat different evaluation methodologies to assess these other goals. The growing number of these studies, their alternative methodologies, and disagreements concerning their importance have motivated us to more carefully examine them. In this article, we review this growing collection of visualization evaluations that examine user experience goals and we discuss multiple issues regarding the studies including questions about their motivation and utility. Our aim is to provide a resource for future work that plans to evaluate visualizations using these goals.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    BELIV '16: Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Beyond Time and Errors on Novel Evaluation Methods for Visualization
    October 2016
    177 pages
    ISBN:9781450348188
    DOI:10.1145/2993901
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 24 October 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. Data visualization
    2. engagement
    3. enjoyment
    4. memorability
    5. usability goals
    6. user experience goals

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