Providing visual analytics guidance through decision support

Guidance in visual analytics aims to support users in accomplishing their analytical goals and generating insights. Different approaches for guidance are widely adopted in many tools and frameworks for various purposes – from helping to focus on relevant data subspaces to selecting suitable visualization techniques. With each of these different purposes come specific considerations on how to provide the needed guidance. In this paper, we propose a generic method for making these considerations by framing the guidance problem as a decision problem and applying decision making theory and models toward its solution. This method passes through three stages: (1) identifying decision points; (2) deriving and evaluating alternatives; (3) visualizing the resulting alternatives to support users in comparing them and making their choice. Our method is realized as a set of practical worksheets and illustrated by applying it to a use case of providing guidance among different clustering methods. Finally, we compare our method with existing guidance frameworks to relate and delineate the respective goals and contributions of each.