Heuristic Evaluation of Information Visualization

This was a joint project with: Torre Zuk, Lothar Schlesier, Petra Neumann, Mark S. Hancock, Sheelagh Carpendale

Motivation:

Heuristic evaluation is a well known discount evaluation technique in human-computer interaction (HCI) but has not been utilized in information visualization (InfoVis) to the same extent. While several sets of heuristics have been previously proposed and used to perform heuristic evaluation for information visualizations there is no agreed upon set of heuristics to find specific sets of problem.

Look at Jakob Nielsen's page on heuristic evaluation for more background information.

Our Project:

We performed a meta-analysis with the goal of exploring the issues of heuristic evaluation for InfoVis. This meta-analysis concentrates on issues pertaining to the selection and organization of heuristics, and the process itself. For this purpose, we used three sets of previously published heuristics to assess a visual decision support system that is used to examine simulation data. The meta-analysis shows that the evaluation process and results have a high dependency on the heuristics and the types of evaluators chosen.