Visualizing Oceans of Data: Educational interface design

The Oceans of Data project is an NSF-funded, 2-year interdisciplinary review of literature and expert opinion pertinent to making interfaces to large scientific databases accessible to and usable by novice learners and their instructors. The Visualizing Oceans of Data Knowledge Status Report (KSR) presents cross-cutting and visualization-specific guidelines that highlight how interface design features can address and ameliorate challenges novice users face as they navigate complex databases to find data, and construct and look for patterns in maps, graphs, animations and other data visualizations. Integrating information from hundreds of diverse sources, the resulting report is a set of over seventy guidelines that represents a synthesis of knowledge derived from key bodies of literature in the cognitive sciences, neurosciences, learning sciences, computer sciences, and many other disciplines. This paper presents the results of this work in the form of a small sampling of example guidelines from the full Visualizing Oceans of Data report.