Guidance is an emerging topic in the field of visual analytics. Guidance can support users in pursuing their analytical goals more efficiently and help in making the analysis successful. However, it is not clear how guidance approaches should be designed and what specific factors should be considered for effective support. In this paper, we approach this problem from the perspective of guidance designers. We present a framework comprising requirements and a set of specific phases designers should go through when designing guidance for visual analytics. We relate this process with a set of quality criteria we aim to support with our framework, that are necessary for obtaining a suitable and effective guidance solution. To demonstrate the practical usability of our methodology, we apply our framework to the design of guidance in three analysis scenarios and a design walk‐through session. Moreover, we list the emerging challenges and report how the framework can be used to design guidance solutions that mitigate these issues.

Analysis of spatial multivariate data, i.e., measurements at irregularly‐spaced locations, is a challenging topic in visualization and statistics alike. Such data are inteGral to many domains, e.g., indicators of valuable minerals are measured for mine prospecting. Popular analysis methods, like PCA, often by design do not account for the spatial nature of the data. Thus they, together with their spatial variants, must be employed very carefully. Clearly, it is preferable to use methods that were specifically designed for such data, like spatial blind source separation (SBSS). However, SBSS requires two tuning parameters, which are themselves complex spatial objects. Setting these parameters involves navigating two large and interdependent parameter spaces, while also taking into account prior knowledge of the physical reality represented by the data. To support analysts in this process, we developed a visual analytics prototype. We evaluated it with experts in visualization, SBSS, and geochemistry. Our evaluations show that our interactive prototype allows to define complex and realistic parameter settings efficiently, which was so far impractical. Settings identified by a non‐expert led to remarkable and surprising insights for a domain expert. Therefore, this paper presents important first steps to enable the use of a promising analysis method for spatial multivariate data.

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Temporal Blind Source Separation (TBSS) is used to obtain the true, underlying processes from noisy temporal multivariate data, such as electrocardiograms. While these algorithms are widely used, the involved tasks are not well supported in current visualization tools, which offer only textbased interactions and static images. Analysts are limited in analyzing and comparing obtained results, which consist of diverse data such as matrices and ensembles of time series. Additionally, parameters have a big impact on separation performance, but as a consequence of improper tooling analysts currently do not consider the whole parameter space. We propose to solve these problems by applying visual analytics (VA) principles. To this end, we developed a task abstraction and visualization design in a user-centered design process. We present TBSSvis, an interactive webbased VA prototype, which we evaluated in two qualitative user studies. Feedback and observations from these studies show that TBSSvis supports the actual workflow and combination of interactive visualizations that facilitate the tasks involved in analyzing TBBS results. It also provides guidance to facilitate informed parameter selection and the analysis of the data at hand.