Towards Supporting Interactive Sketch-Based Visualisations

Abstract

The goal of the information visualisation community is to develop interactive visualisations of abstract data to aid in cognition. While most information visualisation research approaches this from a data-driven or a task-driven perspective, our objective is to gain a better understanding of how people already use visuals in their everyday thinking processes and to apply this understanding to create new information visualisations. To this end, we have performed three observational studies: one, looking at the lifecycles of sketches and diagrams used by software developers, another looking at the visual constructs on knowledge workers’ whiteboards, and a third examining how people might interact with a pen-and-touch based system for data exploration using charts. In this paper we group the findings of these three studies to develop a fuller picture of the ways in which people use sketching for visualisation tasks.