Design of a construction management data visualization environment: A bottom-up approach

Described is designing a construction management (CM) data visualization environment with emphasis on exploring a bottom-up design methodology as part of the environment development process. Investigated is how such a methodology combined with design guidelines and a top-down approach can aid the creation of ready-to-use visualizations that help CM practitioners answer specific CM questions and support general CM analytics useful for a range of CM functions/tasks. Three visualization development cases for the time performance control application are used to demonstrate the bottom-up design process. The visualizations implemented are tested to show their usefulness and to identify opportunities for incorporating new visualization features that are common to other visualizations supported in the environment. The key lesson learned from the bottom-up development process is that by attending to individual image details, the developed visualizations: 1) are responsiveness to answering specific CM questions, 2) apply state-of-the-art data visualization techniques, 3) fit within an environment architecture, and 4) allow for the enrichment of design guidelines and lists of common visualization features.