SIS Research Seminar by Ray Hong | Improving People's Everyday Information-seeking Practice using Visualization

People individually or collaboratively explore information using diverse types of information-seeking systems, such as recommendation systems or business intelligence systems. Although the information-seeking behavior is frequent and prevalent in people's everyday life, people often struggle with information overload and communication overload which results in leading them to put substantial effort into understanding insights and making decisions. In this talk, I introduce my two approaches that apply theoretical constructs from Information Visualization and support people to seek information with reduced cognitive effort. Collaborative Dynamic Queries (C-DQ) visually externalize a group's filter preferences, open the process of information-seeking to everyone in a group, and help the group to achieve grounding and yield an agreeable decision with reduced communication cost (See Fig. 1). Distance Cartograms (DCs) warp a map such that distances between a single location and to the rest of the locations present a travel time between them (See Fig. 2). Using DCs, people can easily perceive and compare travel times to multiple locations at a glance when exploring locations nearby. I conclude this talk by discussing future implications in terms of how research in this direction can improve individual or a group's visual information-seeking and exploratory visual analytics.
 

Fig. 1. Group awareness in C-DQ: present information about filter ranges that group members indicated (left), and which members’ ranges include which candidates (right)
 

Fig. 2. Restaurants around Green Lake in Seattle, presented with Mercator projection (left), and wit Distance Cartogram (right)
 

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