Benefits and trade-offs of different model representations in decision support systems for non-expert users

Abstract

Researchers have reported a lack of experience and low graph literacy as significant problems when making visual analytics applications available to a general audience. Therefore, it is fundamental to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different visualizations in the decision-making process. This paper explores the benefits and challenges of an intuitive, a compact, and a detailed visualization for supporting non-expert users. Using objective and subjective means proposed by earlier work, we determine the benefits and trade-offs of these visualizations for different task complexity levels. We found that while an intuitive visualization can be a good choice for easy level and medium level tasks, hard level tasks are best supported with a richer, yet visually more demanding visualization.