Learnability of interactive coordinated-view visualizations

This paper examines the human computer interaction issue of learnability of interactive coordinated-view visualizations. We take the case of DataMaps, a census data visualization tool intended for a general audience with a huge percentage of novices. Usability tests conducted on DataMaps revealed three main kinds of problems that novices faced: they could not make strategic selections of coordinated visualizations according to a given task, they lacked familiarity with the nature of the attributes, and there were several misunderstandings of visual syntax and interaction widget usage. We outline design features which are desirable for novice-friendliness: Task based organization of coordinated views to enable strategic selection of views to suit the task, data centric approach to familiarize novices with data, self disclosure of visual syntax features and interaction mechanisms by the interface. The design should be such that they can smoothly transition from being a novice to expert. We examine how these principles may be applied to DataMaps to re-design it for "novice-friendliness".