Oopsy-daisy: failure stories in quantitative evaluation studies for visualizations

Abstract

Designing, conducting, and interpreting evaluation studies with human participants is challenging. While researchers in cognitive psychology, social science, and human-computer interaction view competence in evaluation study methodology a key job skill, it is only recently that visualization researchers have begun to feel the need to learn this skill as well. Acquiring such competence is a lengthy and difficult process fraught with much trial and error. Recent work on patterns for visualization evaluation is now providing much-needed best practices for how to evaluate a visualization technique with human participants. However, negative examples of evaluation methods that fail, yield no usable results, or simply do not work are still missing, mainly because of the difficulty and lack of incentive for publishing negative results or failed research. In this paper, we take the position that there are many good ideas with the best intentions for how to evaluate a visualization tool that simply do not work. We call upon the community to help collect these negative examples in order to show the other side of the coin: what not to do when trying to evaluate visualization.