DevLan/vispubs huggingface dataset:
Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking: Design Implications from Paper Bullet Journals
Authors: Amid Ayobi, Tobias Sonne, Paul Marshall, Anna L. Cox
Published at CHI, 2018

Digital self-tracking technologies offer many potential benefits over self-tracking with paper notebooks. However, they are often too rigid to support people's practical and emotional needs in everyday settings. To inform the design of more flexible self-tracking tools, we examine bullet journaling: an analogue and customisable approach for logging and reflecting on everyday life. Analysing a corpus of paper bullet journal photos and related conversations on Instagram, we found that individuals extended and adapted bullet journaling systems to their changing practical and emotional needs through: (1) creating and combining personally meaningful visualisations of different types of trackers, such as habit, mood, and symptom trackers; (2) engaging in mindful reflective thinking through design practices and self-reflective strategies; and (3) posting photos of paper journals online to become part of a self-tracking culture of sharing and learning. We outline two interrelated design directions for flexible and mindful self-tracking: digitally extending analogue self-tracking and supporting digital self-tracking as a mindful design practice.
Frames and Slants in Titles of Visualizations on Controversial Topics
Authors: Ha Kyung Kong, Zhicheng Liu 0001, Karrie Karahalios
Published at CHI, 2018

Slanted framing in news article titles induce bias and influence recall. While recent studies found that viewers focus extensively on titles when reading visualizations, the impact of titles in visualization remains underexplored. We study frames in visualization titles, and how the slanted framing of titles and the viewer's pre-existing attitude impact recall, perception of bias, and change of attitude. When asked to compose visualization titles, people used five existing news frames, an open-ended frame, and a statistics frame. We found that the slant of the title influenced the perceived main message of a visualization, with viewers deriving opposing messages from the same visualization. The results did not show any significant effect on attitude change. We highlight the danger of subtle statistics frames and viewers' unwarranted conviction of the neutrality of visualizations. Finally, we present a design implication for the generation of visualization titles and one for the viewing of titles.
HomeFinder Revisited: Finding Ideal Homes with Reachability-Centric Multi-Criteria Decision Making
Authors: Di Weng, Heming Zhu, Jie Bao 0003, Yu Zheng 0004, Yingcai Wu
Published at CHI, 2018

Finding an ideal home is a difficult and laborious process. One of the most crucial factors in this process is the reachability between the home location and the concerned points of interest, such as places of work and recreational facilities. However, such importance is unrecognized in the extant real estate systems. By characterizing user requirements and analytical tasks in the context of finding ideal homes, we designed ReACH, a novel visual analytics system that assists people in finding, evaluating, and choosing a home based on multiple criteria, including reachability. In addition, we developed an improved data-driven model for approximating reachability with massive taxi trajectories. This model enables users to interactively integrate their knowledge and preferences to make judicious and informed decisions. We show the improvements in our model by comparing the theoretical complexities with the prior study and demonstrate the usability and effectiveness of the proposed system with task-based evaluation.
InfoNice: Easy Creation of Information Graphics
Authors: Yun Wang 0012, Haidong Zhang, He Huang, Xi Chen, Qiufeng Yin, Zhitao Hou, Dongmei Zhang 0001, Qiong Luo 0001, Huamin Qu
Published at CHI, 2018

Information graphics are widely used to convey messages and present insights in data effectively. However, creating expressive data-driven infographics remains a great challenge for general users without design expertise. We present InfoNice, a visualization design tool that enables users to easily create data-driven infographics. InfoNice allows users to convert unembellished charts into infographics with multiple visual elements through mark customization. We implement InfoNice into Microsoft Power BI to demonstrate the integration of InfoNice into data analysis workflow seamlessly, bridging the gap between data exploration and presentation. We evaluate the usability and usefulness of InfoNice through example infographics, an in-lab user study, and real-world user feedback. Our results show that InfoNice enables users to create a variety of infographics easily for common scenarios.
Investigating the Effect of the Multiple Comparisons Problem in Visual Analysis
Authors: Emanuel Zgraggen, Zheguang Zhao, Robert C. Zeleznik, Tim Kraska
Published at CHI, 2018

The goal of a visualization system is to facilitate dataset-driven insight discovery. But what if the insights are spurious? Features or patterns in visualizations can be perceived as relevant insights, even though they may arise from noise. We often compare visualizations to a mental image of what we are interested in: a particular trend, distribution or an unusual pattern. As more visualizations are examined and more comparisons are made, the probability of discovering spurious insights increases. This problem is well-known in Statistics as the multiple comparisons problem (MCP) but overlooked in visual analysis. We present a way to evaluate MCP in visualization tools by measuring the accuracy of user reported insights on synthetic datasets with known ground truth labels. In our experiment, over 60% of user insights were false. We show how a confirmatory analysis approach that accounts for all visual comparisons, insights and non-insights, can achieve similar results as one that requires a validation dataset.
Looks Can Be Deceiving: Using Gaze Visualisation to Predict and Mislead Opponents in Strategic Gameplay
Authors: Joshua Newn, Fraser Allison, Eduardo Velloso, Frank Vetere
Published at CHI, 2018

In competitive co-located gameplay, players use their opponents' gaze to make predictions about their plans while simultaneously managing their own gaze to avoid giving away their plans. This socially competitive dimension is lacking in most online games, where players are out of sight of each other. We conducted a lab study using a strategic online game; finding that (1) players are better at discerning their opponent's plans when shown a live visualisation of the opponent's gaze, and (2) players who are aware that their gaze is tracked will manipulate their gaze to keep their intentions hidden. We describe the strategies that players employed, to various degrees of success, to deceive their opponent through their gaze behaviour. This gaze-based deception adds an effortful and challenging aspect to the competition. Lastly, we discuss the various implications of our findings and its applicability for future game design.
Methods for Intentional Encoding of High Capacity Human-Designable Visual Markers
Authors: Joshua D. A. Jung, Daniel Vogel 0001
Published at CHI, 2018

Previous techniques for human-designable visual markers have focused on small encoding spaces, and assume artists do not need to encode specific bit representations. We present a general framework for human-designable visual markers for artists to encode specific bit representations in large spaces. A three-part study, conducted over three weeks, methodically evaluates the usability of different encoding methods when artists encode specific bit representations. The methods span different shape characteristics suitable for artist encoding (convexity, hollowness, number, size, and distance from centroid) and visualization tools are proposed to aid in this process. We further demonstrate that any of the methods presented may be practically used to encode a URL with the aid of a universally available database like TinyURL (rather than a task-specific database), making human-designable visual markers practical for applications such as advertisements.
More Text Please! Understanding and Supporting the Use of Visualization for Clinical Text Overview
Authors: Nicole Sultanum, Michael Brudno, Daniel Wigdor, Fanny Chevalier
Published at CHI, 2018

Clinical practice is heavily reliant on the use of unstructured text to document patient stories due to its expressive and flexible nature. However, a physician's capacity to recover information from text for clinical overview is severely affected when records get longer and time pressure increases. Data visualization strategies have been explored to aid in information retrieval by replacing text with graphical summaries, though often at the cost of omitting important text features. This causes physician mistrust and limits real-world adoption. This work presents our investigation into the role and use of text in clinical practice, and reports on efforts to assess the best of both worlds---text and visualization---to facilitate clinical overview. We report on insights garnered from a field study, and the lessons learned from an iterative design process and evaluation of a text-visualization prototype, MedStory, with 14 medical professionals. The results led to a number of grounded design recommendations to guide visualization design to support clinical text overview.
Physical Keyboards in Virtual Reality: Analysis of Typing Performance and Effects of Avatar Hands
Authors: Pascal Knierim, Valentin Schwind, Anna Maria Feit, Florian Nieuwenhuizen, Niels Henze
Published at CHI, 2018

Entering text is one of the most common tasks when interacting with computing systems. Virtual Reality (VR) presents a challenge as neither the user's hands nor the physical input devices are directly visible. Hence, conventional desktop peripherals are very slow, imprecise, and cumbersome. We developed a apparatus that tracks the user's hands, and a physical keyboard, and visualize them in VR. In a text input study with 32 participants, we investigated the achievable text entry speed and the effect of hand representations and transparency on typing performance, workload, and presence. With our apparatus, experienced typists benefited from seeing their hands, and reach almost outside-VR performance. Inexperienced typists profited from semi-transparent hands, which enabled them to type just 5.6 WPM slower than with a regular desktop setup. We conclude that optimizing the visualization of hands in VR is important, especially for inexperienced typists, to enable a high typing performance.
Pictures Worth a Thousand Words: Reflections on Visualizing Personal Blood Glucose Forecasts for Individuals with Type 2 Diabetes
Authors: Pooja M. Desai, Matthew E. Levine, David J. Albers, Lena Mamykina
Published at CHI, 2018

Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) is a common chronic condition that requires management of one's lifestyle, including nutrition. Critically, patients often lack a clear understanding of how everyday meals impact their blood glucose. New predictive analytics approaches can provide personalized mealtime blood glucose forecasts. While communicating forecasts can be challenging, effective strategies for doing so remain little explored. In this study, we conducted focus groups with 13 participants to identify approaches to visualizing personalized blood glucose forecasts that can promote diabetes self-management and understand key styles and visual features that resonate with individuals with diabetes. Focus groups demonstrated that individuals rely on simple heuristics and tend to take a reactive approach to their health and nutrition management. Further, the study highlighted the need for simple and explicit, yet information-rich design. Effective visualizations were found to utilize common metaphors alongside words, numbers, and colors to convey a sense of authority and encourage action and learning.
Self-Reflection and Personal Physicalization Construction
Authors: Alice Thudt, Uta Hinrichs, Samuel Huron, Sheelagh Carpendale
Published at CHI, 2018

Self-reflection is a central goal of personal informatics systems, and constructing visualizations from physical tokens has been found to help people reflect on data. However, so far, constructive physicalization has only been studied in lab environments with provided datasets. Our qualitative study investigates the construction of personal physicalizations in people's domestic environments over 2-4 weeks. It contributes an understanding of (1) the process of creating personal physicalizations, (2) the types of personal insights facilitated, (3) the integration of self-reflection in the physicalization process, and (4) its benefits and challenges for self-reflection. We found that in constructive personal physicalization, data collection, construction and self-reflections are deeply intertwined. This extends previous models of visualization creation and data-driven self-reflection. We outline how benefits such as reflection through manual construction, personalization, and presence in everyday life can be transferred to a wider set of digital and physical systems.
SpeechBubbles: Enhancing Captioning Experiences for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing People in Group Conversations
Authors: Yi-Hao Peng, Ming-Wei Hsu, Paul Taele, Ting-Yu Lin, Po-En Lai, Leon Hsu, Tzu-Chuan Chen, Te-Yen Wu, Yu-An Chen, Hsien-Hui Tang, Mike Y. Chen
Published at CHI, 2018

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) individuals encounter difficulties when engaged in group conversations with hearing individuals, due to factors such as simultaneous utterances from multiple speakers and speakers whom may be potentially out of view. We interviewed and co-designed with eight DHH participants to address the following challenges: 1) associating utterances with speakers, 2) ordering utterances from different speakers, 3) displaying optimal content length, and 4) visualizing utterances from out-of-view speakers. We evaluated multiple designs for each of the four challenges through a user study with twelve DHH participants. Our study results showed that participants significantly preferred speechbubble visualizations over traditional captions. These design preferences guided our development of SpeechBubbles, a real-time speech recognition interface prototype on an augmented reality head-mounted display. From our evaluations, we further demonstrated that DHH participants preferred our prototype over traditional captions for group conversations.
T-Cal: Understanding Team Conversational Data with Calendar-based Visualization
Authors: Siwei Fu, Jian Zhao 0010, Hao Fei Cheng, Haiyi Zhu, Jennifer Marlow
Published at CHI, 2018

Understanding team communication and collaboration patterns is critical for improving work efficiency in organizations. This paper presents an interactive visualization system, T-Cal, that supports the analysis of conversation data from modern team messaging platforms (e.g., Slack). T-Cal employs a user-familiar visual interface, a calendar, to enable seamless multi-scale browsing of data from different perspectives. T-Cal also incorporates a number of analytical techniques for disentangling interleaving conversations, extracting keywords, and estimating sentiment. The design of T-Cal is based on an iterative user-centered design process including interview studies, requirements gathering, initial prototypes demonstration, and evaluation with domain users. The resulting two case studies indicate the effectiveness and usefulness of T-Cal in real-world applications, including daily conversations within an industry research lab and student group chats in a MOOC.
Tangible Drops: A Visio-Tactile Display Using Actuated Liquid-Metal Droplets
Authors: Deepak Ranjan Sahoo, Timothy Neate, Yutaka Tokuda, Jennifer Pearson 0001, Simon Robinson 0001, Sriram Subramanian, Matt Jones 0001
Published at CHI, 2018

We present Tangible Drops, a visio-tactile display that for the first time provides physical visualization and tactile feedback using a planar liquid interface. It presents digital information interactively by tracing dynamic patterns on horizontal flat surfaces using liquid metal drops on a programmable electrode array. It provides tactile feedback with directional information in the 2D vector plane using linear locomotion and/or vibration of the liquid metal drops. We demonstrate move, oscillate, merge, split and dispense-from-reservoir functions of the liquid metal drops by consuming low power (450 mW per electrode) and low voltage (8--15 V). We report on results of our empirical study with 12 participants on tactile feedback using 8 mm diameter drops, which indicate that Tangible Drops can convey tactile sensations such as changing speed, varying direction and controlled oscillation with no visual feedback. We present the design space and demonstrate the applications of Tangible Drops, and conclude by suggesting potential future applications for the technique.
The Effects of Adding Search Functionality to Interactive Visualizations on the Web
Authors: Mi Feng, Cheng Deng, Evan M. Peck, Lane Harrison
Published at CHI, 2018

The widespread use of text-based search in user interfaces has led designers in visualization to occasionally add search functionality to their creations. Yet it remains unclear how search may impact a person's behavior. Given the unstructured context of the web, users may not have explicit information-seeking goals and designers cannot make assumptions about user attention. To bridge this gap, we observed the impact of integrating search with five visualizations across 830 online participants. In an unguided task, we find that (1) the presence of text-based search influences people's information-seeking goals, (2) search can alter the data that people explore and how they engage with it, and (3) the effects of search are amplified in visualizations where people are familiar with the underlying dataset. These results suggest that text-search in web visualizations drives users towards more diverse information seeking goals, and may be valuable in a range of existing visualization designs.
ThermoKiosk: Investigating Roles for Digital Surveys of Thermal Experience in Workplace Comfort Management
Authors: Adrian K. Clear, Samantha Mitchell Finnigan, Patrick Olivier, Rob Comber
Published at CHI, 2018

Thermal comfort in shared workplaces is often contested and impacts productivity, wellbeing, and energy use. Yet, subjective and situated comfort experiences are rarely captured and engaged with. In this paper, we explore roles for digital surveys in capturing and visualising subjective experiences of comfort in situ for comfort management. We present findings from a 3-week field trial of our prototype system called ThermoKiosk, which we deployed in an open plan, shared office with a history of thermal comfort complaints. In interviews with occupants and members of facilities management, we find that the data and interactions can play an important role in initiating dialogue to understand and handle tensions, and point to design considerations for more systematically integrating them into workplace comfort practices.
TopicOnTiles: Tile-Based Spatio-Temporal Event Analytics via Exclusive Topic Modeling on Social Media
Authors: Minsuk Choi, Dear Sungbok Shin, Jinho Choi 0005, Scott Langevin, Christopher Bethune, Philippe Horne, Nathan Kronenfeld, Ramakrishnan Kannan, Barry L. Drake, Haesun Park, Jaegul Choo
Published at CHI, 2018

Detecting anomalous events of a particular area in a timely manner is an important task. Geo-tagged social media data are useful resource for this task; however, the abundance of everyday language in them makes this task still challenging. To address such challenges, we present TopicOnTiles, a visual analytics system that can reveal information relevant to anomalous events in a multi-level tile-based map interface by using social media data. To this end, we adopt and improve a recently proposed topic modeling method that can extract spatio-temporally exclusive topics corresponding to a particular region and a time point. Furthermore, we utilize a tile-based map interface to efficiently handle large-scale data in parallel. Our user interface effectively highlights anomalous tiles using our novel glyph visualization that encodes the degree of anomaly computed by our exclusive topic modeling processes. To show the effectiveness of our system, we present several usage scenarios using real-world datasets as well as comprehensive user study results.
TopoText: Context-Preserving Text Data Exploration Across Multiple Spatial Scales
Authors: Jiawei Zhang 0003, Chittayong Surakitbanharn, Niklas Elmqvist, Ross Maciejewski, Zhenyu Cheryl Qian, David S. Ebert
Published at CHI, 2018

TopoText is a context-preserving technique for visualizing text data for multi-scale spatial aggregates to gain insight into spatial phenomena. Conventional exploration requires users to navigate across multiple scales but only presents the information related to the current scale. This limitation potentially adds more steps of interaction and cognitive overload to the users. TopoText renders multi-scale aggregates into a single visual display combining novel text-based encoding and layout methods that draw labels along the boundary or filled within the aggregates. The text itself not only summarizes the semantics at each individual scale, but also indicates the spatial coverage of the aggregates and their underlying hierarchical relationships. We validate TopoText with both a user study as well as several application examples.
Towards Design Principles for Visual Analytics in Operations Contexts
Authors: Matthew Conlen, Sara Stalla, Chelly Jin, Maggie Hendrie, Hillary Mushkin, Santiago V. Lombeyda, Scott Davidoff
Published at CHI, 2018

Operations engineering teams interact with complex data systems to make technical decisions that ensure the operational efficacy of their missions. To support these decision-making tasks, which may require elastic prioritization of goals dependent on changing conditions, custom analytics tools are often developed. We were asked to develop such a tool by a team at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where rover telecom operators make decisions based on models predicting how much data rovers can transfer from the surface of Mars. Through research, design, implementation, and informal evaluation of our new tool, we developed principles to inform the design of visual analytics systems in operations contexts. We offer these principles as a step towards understanding the complex task of designing these systems. The principles we present are applicable to designers and developers tasked with building analytics systems in domains that face complex operations challenges such as scheduling, routing, and logistics.