Informal Skill-Sharing in Collaborative Immersive Analytics

Newcomers to immersive analytics systems would benefit from informally learning data analysis skills (e.g., reading a vis, using a system) when collaborating with more expert participants. We want to design tools that facilitate this informal learning by encouraging the informal sharing of data literacy skills during collaborative immersive analysis. A first step toward this goal is to understand how informal skill sharing takes place in order to identify how it could be improved. We experimentally studied informal skill-sharing in pairs of participants analyzing scatterplots in a shared virtual reality environment. We used an original mixed-method to analyze video and log recordings as well as subjective experiential data, based on common ground theory and the grounding process. We uncovered 101 episodes of skill-sharing, organized in 14 recurring types, and identified associated problems from which we could propose six implications for designing systems that favor informal skill-sharing, hence skill learning. The method can be used to study informal skill sharing in other systems enabling embodied face-to-face collaboration, but would need to be simplified for large-scale use.