Andreas Hinterreiter

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/.

Guided Tour for Dashboard Onboarding

In this work we propose Marjorie, a visual analytics approach to address the challenge of analyzing patients' diabetes data during brief regular appointments with their diabetologists. Designed in consultation with diabetologists, Marjorie uses a combination of visual and algorithmic methods to support the exploration of patterns in the data. Patterns of interest include seasonal variations of the glucose profles, and non-periodic patterns such as fuctuations around mealtimes or periods of hypoglycemia (i.e., glucose levels below the normal range). We introduce a unique representation of glucose data based on modifed horizon graphs and hierarchical clustering of adjacent carbohydrate or insulin entries. Semantic zooming allows the exploration of patterns on different levels of temporal detail. We evaluated our solution in a case study, which demonstrated Marjorie's potential to provide valuable insights into therapy parameters and unfavorable eating habits, among others. The study results and informal feedback collected from target users suggest that Marjorie effectively supports patients and diabetologists in the joint exploration of patterns in diabetes data, potentially enabling more informed treatment decisions. A free copy of this paper and all supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/34t8c/ .

In this work we propose Marjorie, a visual analytics approach to address the challenge of analyzing patients' diabetes data during brief regular appointments with their diabetologists.Designed in consultation with diabetologists, Marjorie uses a combination of visual and algorithmic methods to support the exploration of patterns in the data.Patterns of interest include seasonal variations of the glucose profiles, and non-periodic patterns such as fluctuations around mealtimes or periods of hypoglycemia (i.e., glucose levels below the normal range).We introduce a unique representation of glucose data based on modified horizon graphs and hierarchical clustering of adjacent carbohydrate or insulin entries.Semantic zooming allows the exploration of patterns on different levels of temporal detail.We evaluated our solution in a case study, which demonstrated Marjorie's potential to provide valuable insights into therapy parameters and unfavorable eating habits, among others.The study results and informal feedback collected from target users suggest that Marjorie effectively supports patients and diabetologists in the joint exploration of patterns in diabetes data, potentially enabling more informed treatment decisions.A free copy of this paper and all supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/34t8c/.

ParaDime is a framework for parametric dimensionality reduction (DR). In parametric DR, neural networks are trained to embed high‐dimensional data items in a low‐dimensional space while minimizing an objective function. ParaDime builds on the idea that the objective functions of several modern DR techniques result from transformed inter‐item relationships. It provides a common interface for specifying these relations and transformations and for defining how they are used within the losses that govern the training process. Through this interface, ParaDime unifies parametric versions of DR techniques such as metric MDS, t‐SNE, and UMAP. It allows users to fully customize all aspects of the DR process. We show how this ease of customization makes ParaDime suitable for experimenting with interesting techniques such as hybrid classification/embedding models and supervised DR. This way, ParaDime opens up new possibilities for visualizing high‐dimensional data.

ParaDime is a framework for parametric dimensionality reduction (DR). In parametric DR, neural networks are trained to embed high-dimensional data items in a low-dimensional space while minimizing an objective function. ParaDime builds on the idea that the objective functions of several modern DR techniques result from transformed inter-item relationships. It provides a common interface for specifying these relations and transformations and for defining how they are used within the losses that govern the training process. Through this interface, ParaDime unifies parametric versions of DR techniques such as metric MDS, t-SNE, and UMAP. It allows users to fully customize all aspects of the DR process. We show how this ease of customization makes ParaDime suitable for experimenting with interesting techniques such as hybrid classification/embedding models and supervised DR. This way, ParaDime opens up new possibilities for visualizing high-dimensional data.