IEEE VIS 2024 Content: D-Tour: Semi-Automatic Generation of Interactive Guided Tours for Visualization Dashboard Onboarding

D-Tour: Semi-Automatic Generation of Interactive Guided Tours for Visualization Dashboard Onboarding

Vaishali Dhanoa - Pro2Future GmbH, Linz, Austria. Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

Andreas Hinterreiter - Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

Vanessa Fediuk - Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

Niklas Elmqvist - Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Eduard Gröller - Institute of Visual Computing . Human-Centered Technology, Vienna, Austria

Marc Streit - Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria

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Room: Bayshore II

2024-10-17T13:18:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2024-10-17T13:18:00Z
Exemplar figure, described by caption below
D-Tour Prototype Authoring Mode. Authors pick (a) automatically extracted visualization categories, General, Insight, or Interaction from the Content Extraction View and drag them to the Content Arrangement View, where they (b) arrange them, (b.1) thus crafting a tour and (b.2) adding explanations to the tour content. In the Dissemination View they (c) test changes before disseminating them. A selection of the Column Chart General in the Content Extraction View is shown which is highlighted in the Content Arrangement View and in the Dissemination View. Its associated content can be seen in (b.2)
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Keywords

Dashboards, onboarding, storytelling, tutorial, interactive tours, open-world games

Abstract

Onboarding a user to a visualization dashboard entails explaining its various components, including the chart types used, the data loaded, and the interactions available. Authoring such an onboarding experience is time-consuming and requires significant knowledge and little guidance on how best to complete this task. Depending on their levels of expertise, end users being onboarded to a new dashboard can be either confused and overwhelmed or disinterested and disengaged. We propose interactive dashboard tours (D-Tours) as semi-automated onboarding experiences that preserve the agency of users with various levels of expertise to keep them interested and engaged. Our interactive tours concept draws from open-world game design to give the user freedom in choosing their path through onboarding. We have implemented the concept in a tool called D-TOUR PROTOTYPE, which allows authors to craft custom interactive dashboard tours from scratch or using automatic templates. Automatically generated tours can still be customized to use different media (e.g., video, audio, and highlighting) or new narratives to produce an onboarding experience tailored to an individual user. We demonstrate the usefulness of interactive dashboard tours through use cases and expert interviews. Our evaluation shows that authors found the automation in the D-Tour Prototype helpful and time-saving, and users found the created tours engaging and intuitive. This paper and all supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/6fbjp/.