Evaluating visualization environments: Cognitive, social, and cultural perspectives

Abstract

Computer-based visualization environments enable their users to create, manipulate, and explore visual representations of data, information, processes and phenomena. They play a prominent role in the practices and education of many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) communities. There is a growing need to evaluate such environments empirically, in order not only to ensure that they are effective, but also to better understand how and why they are effective. How does one empirically evaluate the effectiveness of a visualization environment? I argue that choosing an approach is a matter of finding the right perspective for viewing human use of the visualization environment. This chapter presents three alternative perspectives-Cognitive, Social, and Cultural-each of which is distinguished by its own intellectual tradition and guiding theory. In so doing, the chapter has three broad goals: (a) to illustrate that different research traditions and perspectives lead to different definitions of effectiveness; (b) to show that, depending upon the research questions of interest and the situations in which a visualization environment is being used, each perspective can prove more or less useful in approaching the empirical evaluation of the environment; and (c) to provide visualization researchers with a repertoire of evaluation methods to draw from, and guidelines for matching research methods to research questions of interest.