Defining Information Visualization Heuristics Based on Heuristic Grouping by Experts

Abstract

The visualization community has been done some efforts to construct a set of heuristics focused on the qualitative evaluation of a visualization (including usability issues, but not limited to them), which could be used in Heuristic Evaluations (HE). Despite these efforts, we could not find a consolidated (i.e. solid) set of visualization heuristics in use in our community. In this work, we present initial steps for defining a set of heuristics based on heuristics proposed by our community, aiming that such a set can be used in a visualization-focused Heuristic Evaluation and become consolidated after improvements. To develop this work, we started by collecting visualization heuristics and guidelines proposed by our community in papers related to HE; we also collected guidelines extracted from visualization books. A set of experts grouped these heuristics and guidelines using an online card sorting procedure. We summarized these groups in a set of eight heuristics to be used in a regular HE procedure. We assessed these new heuristics in an experiment with professionals and students with visualization background. These participants pointed out that they were able to use the proposed heuristics to identify problems related to visualization concepts in the systems they evaluated. In addition, most participants indicated that the set is well-defined, appropriate, and pertinent to each case found, which is a positive result towards the definition of a consolidated set of heuristics for visualization.