Scatterplots: Tasks, Data, and Designs

Traditional scatterplots fail to scale as the complexity and amount of data increases. In response, there exist many design options that modify or expand the traditional scatterplot design to meet these larger scales. This breadth of design options creates challenges for designers and practitioners who must select appropriate designs for particular analysis goals. In this paper, we help designers in making design choices for scatterplot visualizations. We survey the literature to catalog scatterplot-specific analysis tasks. We look at how data characteristics influence design decisions. We then survey scatterplot-like designs to understand the range of design options. Building upon these three organizations, we connect data characteristics, analysis tasks, and design choices in order to generate challenges, open questions, and example best practices for the effective design of scatterplots.