How Students Design Visual Interfaces for Information Visualization Tools

Abstract

Creating information visualization tools is a challenging task for which expertise in many research fields is required to get a suitable result for the tasks at hand, for example, to interactively explore data sets for data patterns. To reach a good outcome, it is important to learn how to combine the different concepts from all the related disciplines and to understand what the no-goes are to avoid possible design flaws that hinder a data explorer at solving the tasks at hand. In particular, the newcomers in information visualization have to be taught to follow the rules in visualization, human-computer interaction, but even more the well-known and established design criteria to avoid the same mistakes as others did before. In this paper we describe a teaching concept to guide bachelor students with nearly no experience in information visualization to design their own visual interfaces focusing on data visualization problems. We illustrate the results from the course in several application examples showcasing the visual designs that students came up with.