Authoring tool for Data Journalists integrating Self-Explanatory Visualization Onboarding Concept for a Treemap Visualization

Abstract

Recipients of data stories need a certain visualization literacy level to understand and interpret more elaborate data visualizations correctly. For general audiences, however, visualization literacy levels are known to be relatively low. Therefore, journalists face the challenge that they are either restricted to using very simplistic representation techniques that are widely known or have to design and provide additional means to support readers in learning how to read and interpret a particular data visualization. In general, visualization onboarding methods might be utilized to support users in their individual information needs. But with the technology available to date, the effort needed to integrate such features is high and requires programming skills. To address this challenge, we conducted a design study to iteratively develop a proof-of-concept prototype that allows the semi-automatic creation of onboarding instructions for data-journalistic use cases. The implementation is based on a self-developed onboarding library integrated into the widely-used visualization framework called Flourish. To validate our prototype, user experience evaluations were conducted with seven (data) journalists. Our findings indicated that the journalists would provide simple onboarding instructions with fewer onboarding stages and simplified tooltip-based onboarding messages. The prototype can be accessed at http://bit.ly/3gBqrxv.