Investigating Cognitive Characteristics of Visualization and Insight Environments: A Case Study with WISE

Abstract

Data interpretation and insights resources are central for real-time decision-making processes. The combination of different representations and visualizations can help users orchestrate their understanding about data and, therefore, provide the conditions and opportunities for insights. Visualization and insights environments provide conditions for users to make real-time decisions by allowing users to “play with data” – interact with different visualizations, perspectives, and level of details. The human-computer interaction (HCI) design strategy for such environments must consider this data “playfulness” necessity, and also other cognitive characteristics related to that kind of environment. HCI inspection methods generate enriched evidences to designers about cognitive characteristics of interaction that are related to usability features and they can also identify usability issues. We selected two well-known usability inspection methods – Cognitive Walkthrough (CW) and Nielsen’s Heuristics (NH) – to perform an evaluation of WISE (Weather InSights Environment). WISE was proposed to improve insightful analysis over weather information, taking full advantage of data. In this work, we discuss the data and knowledge gathered with the comparison of results from CW and NH, and we considered the results from our previous work, which was another HCI evaluation using Cognitive Dimensions of Notations framework (CDNf). Using WISE as a use case, we show and discuss evidences of how a set of specific cognitive characteristics can support HCI evaluation and discussions about the (re)design of visualization and insight environments.