Designing dynamic interactive visualisations to support collaboration and cognition

Dynamic interactive visualisations (DIVs) are intended to help coordination and collaboration, through augmenting existing forms of synchronous communication (i.e. phones, face to face, walkie-talkie). A central feature of a DIV is active user involvement: users are required to create, annotate, and change the information visualisation to represent the changes in the activity space they are concerned with. One benefit of doing so is to enable users to externalise and offload some of the cognitive effort involved. in problem-solving, by laying out information in ways that can help them derive a solution and know what to do next. In this paper we describe how we went about designing a DIV to support nomadic team working. We begin by describing our experimentation in designing a DIV. We then show how our computer-based DIV substantially, improved performance for a complex collaborative task, which involved much communication and cognition.