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Visualization Onboarding Grounded in Educational Theories

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Visualization Psychology

Abstract

The aim of visualization is to support people in dealing with large and complex information structures, to make these structures more comprehensible, facilitate exploration, and enable knowledge discovery. However, users often have problems reading and interpreting data from visualizations, in particular when they experience them for the first time. A lack of visualization literacy, i.e., knowledge in terms of domain, data, visual encoding, interaction, and also analytical methods can be observed. To support users in learning how to use new digital technologies, the concept of onboarding has been successfully applied in other domains. However, it has not received much attention from the visualization community so far. This chapter aims to fill this gap by defining the concept and systematically laying out the design space of onboarding in the context of visualization as a descriptive design space. On this basis, we present a survey of approaches from the academic community as well as from commercial products, especially surveying educational theories that inform the onboarding strategies. Additionally, we derived design considerations based on previous publications and present some guidelines for the design of visualization onboarding concepts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://useronboard.com, accessed: 2021-04-30.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Austrian Science Fund as part of the VisOnFire project (FWF P27975-NBL), the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation, and Technology (BMVIT) under the ICT of the Future program via the SEVA project (no. 874018), as well as the FFG, Contract No. 854184: “Pro2Future,” which is funded within the Austrian COMET Program Competence Centers for Excellent Technologies under the auspices of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation, and Technology, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs and of the Provinces of Upper Austria and Styria. COMET is managed by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. St. Poelten University of Applied Sciences, St. Poelten, Austria

    Christina Stoiber, Markus Wagner, Florian Grassinger & Wolfgang Aigner

  2. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Margit Pohl & Benjamin Potzmann

  3. datavisyn GmbH, Linz, Austria

    Holger Stitz

  4. Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria

    Marc Streit

Authors
  1. Christina Stoiber
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  2. Markus Wagner
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  3. Florian Grassinger
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  4. Margit Pohl
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  5. Holger Stitz
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  6. Marc Streit
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  7. Benjamin Potzmann
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  8. Wolfgang Aigner
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Correspondence to Christina Stoiber .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Danielle Albers Szafir

  2. Department of Computer Science, King's College London, London, UK

    Rita Borgo

  3. OeRC, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Min Chen

  4. Department of Public Health, Swansea University, Swansea, UK

    Darren J. Edwards

  5. School of Interactive Arts & Technology, Simon Fraser University, Surrey, BC, Canada

    Brian Fisher

  6. Northeastern University, Boston, USA

    Lace Padilla

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Stoiber, C. et al. (2023). Visualization Onboarding Grounded in Educational Theories. In: Albers Szafir, D., Borgo, R., Chen, M., Edwards, D.J., Fisher, B., Padilla, L. (eds) Visualization Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34738-2_6

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