Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Information Visualization and the Challenge of Universal Usability (09 Jan 2005) Designers need to consider whether their application is to be used by first-time users or by experts who will have invested time and effort into learning the application. A major aspect of accessibility is concerned with enabling users to get started with an application (Andrienko et al., 2002). Even the average professional analyst or researcher may need help, but a major challenge is to help ordinary citizens use Information Visualization applications successfully. Commercial Web sites can decide which population they target but Digital government applications might well be faced by the greatest challenge since they are supposed to be usable by everyone! This implies that most information consumers will be first time users and also that they will have very varied backgrounds and levels of education. They may also have limited time or interest in learning to use the system, but paradoxically may have very high expectations of the services they seek to use. Users want an answer to their question, not necessarily to learn all that a tool can do for them. Let us consider a particular example, that of DataMap (Plaisant, 1993), which was previously named Dynamap or Ymap. Dang et al. (2001) review three approaches that were explored to help users get started with the DataMap interface. DataMap (Figure 3.7) is an interactive visualization tool developed by our Human–Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland and is scheduled to be released by the US Census Bureau on CDs and later on the Web. Users can click on a map of the US to display facts about the areas, select multiple areas to compare, zoom on the map or use dynamic queries to filter the map according to a list of criteria. Finally, they can use a scatter plot, tightly coupled to the map and table, to see relationships between two criteria. Our numerous demonstrations and tests in the lab had made us confident that average users could understand and use DataMap after a minute of two of demonstration, but usability tests at the Census Bureau with novice “off-the-street” users receiving no training revealed that many users had difficulties getting started. Some would struggle with certain details of the interface, while others would simply dismiss the interface saying, “It’s just too complicated”. They had problems not only zooming and selecting multiple regions but also with the sliders. The problems ranged from recognizing that one could move the slider thumbs to understanding what the animation meant. Several users were even puzzled by the interactive scatter plot, some not guessing that dots represented regions and some not knowing how to read a scatter plot at all. Article URL: ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/hcil/Reports-Abstracts-Bibliography/2004-36html/2004-36.htm Read 62 more articles from University Of Maryland sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Understanding Research Trends in Conferences Using PaperLens     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy