Information Visualization Heuristics in Practical Expert Evaluation

Abstract

While traditional HCI heuristics can be used to find usability issues also from information visualization systems, specialized heuristics tailored for the information visualization (InfoViz) domain can be more effective and focus on the special characteristics of these systems. In this study, we describe the application of ten information visualization heuristics from prior research and their testing in practical heuristic evaluation. We found that the selected heuristics were useful with good coverage in our application case. However, based on our observations, we argue that interaction, veracity, and aesthetics related heuristics should be added to the previously used set. The lack of domain knowledge made the evaluators somewhat uneasy with their capability to carry out the investigation in-depth. We suggest to train domain experts with understanding of the data and application domain to carry out the evaluation to get insightful feedback beyond usability issues.