Building for Users not for Experts: Designing a Visualization of the Literature Domain

As researchers we are constantly working with academic literature. Literature data is growing exponentially. Interacting with this huge amount of information has been a challenge for the field of HCI for years. The goal is to assist users in making sense of this information by producing usable designs. Information Visualization (InfoVis) augments users´ cognition when interacting with complex data structures. Although the use of InfoVis as a tool for representing literature data is not new, we have found that most of the existing Literature Knowledge Domain Visualizations (LKDViz) target specialists known as domain analysts who study publication patterns. Our goal is to design a LKDViz tool for academic users. Due to the diversity of academic literature users we captured their experiences and used it as the main source for our design. Interestingly, this method generated design criteria that have not been applied in most of the academic literature visualizations.