Design Considerations for Co-located Collaborative Information Visualization
Researchers
Summary
One of the goals of my PhD research was to come up with initial design considerations for co-located collaborative information visualization. The table listed below present a set of considerations from a large literature review, combining CSCW and Information Visualization research and from the results of several studies conducted on collaborative systems during my PhD. More details can be found in the referenced papers below.
Videos
Here is a video of how co-located collaborative data analysis should not take place.
Collection of Considerations
In order to support more sophisticated interaction than shown in the video above, these are things you should consider when setting up a collaborative environment for data analysis.
| Consideration | Aspects to Consider |
| Collaborative Environment | |
| Display size | Socially appropriate work space size per person, establishment of private, group, and storage spaces |
| Display configuration | Accommodation of group's current work practices, tasks, and goals |
| Input Type | Impact of input type on possible interactions |
| Resolution | Input and display resolution |
| Supporting Social Interaction | |
| Communication | Explicit data referencing across different representational and viewing contexts, e.g., annotation; implicit awareness cues of changes to the data across different representational and viewing contexts, support clarification, validation, data and strategy discussions with shared artifacts |
| Coordination | When using individual data views, location and rotation as a coordination and communication tool, sharing of visualizations and views, multiple synchronous interactions with shared representations, temporal flexibility of analysis processes, analysis processes within different collaboration styles, awareness of analysis activities and histories to encourage joint work |
| Designing Information Visualizations | |
| Representation | Personal preferences, multiple representation types, awareness support, appropriateness of representation for work environment and social interaction, integrated reasoning and sensemaking support |
| Presentation | Arrangement of data items for group access, providing copies of the same data, accommodation of input methods, compensations for display resolution |
| View | Interpretability of data from multiple viewpoints and orientations |
| Interaction | Interactive response rates despite simultaneous interaction, collaborative interaction histories, conflict reduction arising from global changes to data or view, fluid interaction, temporal flexibility of analysis processes, support operation, selection, browsing, and parsing as parallel activities |
Publications
Most comprehensive summary
First published set (more general)
A refinement of the first published set
Some additional considerations work vs. public settings