Visualization Design Methods | Tamara Munzner | Design@Large
Visualization Design Methods
CSE 1202
Wednesdays 4:00PM - 5:15PM
SPEAKER
Tamara Munzner
Professor, Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia
January 25, 2017
ABSTRACT
I will discuss the methodology of design studies, where visualization
researchers analyze a specific real-world problem faced by domain
experts, design a visualization system that supports solving this
problem, validate the design and reflect on lessons learned in
order to refine visualization design guidelines. I will frame this
discussion in terms of a nested model of visualization design and
evaluation. The nested model addresses concerns at four separate
levels: the specifics of a domain situation, the abstractions of tasks
and data that are framed in a domain-agnostic language, the idioms of visual encoding and interaction that visualization design choices can address, and the algorithms that instantiate these idioms as automatic computations. I will illustrate several design challenges via case studies: convincing industrial partners to allocate resources towards redesign of existing tools, bridging the gap from deployment to adoption, accommodating regulatory and organizational constraints on access to both users and data, and supporting the use of computational results that are good enough to be helpful but are far from perfect. These case studies address multiple application domains, ranging from journalism to health care to energy management. They feature different definitions of success, and thus different methods to achieve it.
BIO
Tamara Munzner is a professor at the University of British Columbia
Department of Computer Science, and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford. She has been active in visualization research since 1991 and has published over sixty papers. She co-chaired InfoVis in 2003 and 2004, co-chaired EuroVis in 2009 and 2010, and is a member of the InfoVis Steering Committee and chair of the VIS Executive Committee. Her book Visualization Analysis and Design appeared in 2014, and she received the IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award in 2015. Her research interests include the development, evaluation, and characterization of information visualization systems and techniques. She has worked on problem-driven visualization in a broad range of application domains, including genomics, evolutionary biology, geometric topology, computational linguistics, large-scale system administration, web log analysis, and journalism. Her technique-driven interests include graph drawing and dimensionality reduction. Her evaluation interests include both controlled experiments in a laboratory setting and qualitative studies in the field.