Towards Systematic Design Considerations for Visualizing Cross-View Data Relationships

Due to the scale of data and the complexity of analysis tasks, insight discovery often requires coordinating multiple visualizations (views), with each view displaying different parts of data or the same data from different perspectives. For example, to analyze car sales records, a marketing analyst uses a line chart to visualize the trend of car sales, a scatterplot to inspect the price and horsepower of different cars, and a matrix to compare the transaction amounts in types of deals. To explore related information across multiple views, current visual analysis tools heavily rely on brushing and linking techniques, which may require a significant amount of user effort (e.g., many trial-and-error attempts). There may be other efficient and effective ways of displaying cross-view data relationships to support data analysis with multiple views, but currently there are no guidelines to address this design challenge. In this article, we present systematic design considerations for visualizing cross-view data relationships, which leverages descriptive aspects of relationships and usable visual context of multi-view visualizations. We discuss pros and cons of different designs for showing cross-view data relationships, and provide a set of recommendations for helping practitioners make design decisions.