Visual analytics research is not simply about creating a pretty picture or telling any story. To prove useful, the result of our work must be engaging and approachable, and it must support interactions that help users discover the right genre of story based on their data, tasks and goals. It follows that the visual analytics community must take a user-centric approach by concentrating on the eventual end users to build useful—not just beautiful—visualizations.
User research ensures that the right solution is built to address the users’ actual, rather than perceived, needs. Using systematic approaches, user researchers work directly with end users to gain a deep, genuine understanding of users and their daily tasks and overall goals. By finding patterns among the users, personas—archetypical users—and use cases are created to guide the research questions and subsequent development. Armed with researched user personas and use cases, researchers’ conversations quickly shift from, “But I would expect it to be done this way” to “Our users perform under these conditions and need to perform these tasks to do their jobs.”
User-centered Evaluation Community
Through the Visual Analytics Community, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has established the
