Measuring InfoVis' decision support effectiveness: From theory to practice

The need to evaluate Information Visualization (InfoVis) systems, just as other information systems (IS), cannot be overestimated. In its case, evaluating InfoVis has proved to be more challenging, because many of the previous evaluation studies have been on user interface of IS generally, with few attending to the peculiarities of InfoVis. The few InfoVis evaluations recorded have been mainly on its perceptual function through its interface evaluation, and others on its cognitive support through the knowledge discovery process. Evaluating InfoVis decision support effectiveness has been sparingly attended to. This experience is argued to be caused by insufficient explicit evaluation methods for InfoVis' associated abstract concepts — decision support as an example. This paper uses an unobtrusive research method involving thematic analysis of InfoVis-related theoretical literatures to characterize and categorize the InfoVis evaluation theories. The result presents perceptual, cognitive and decision supports as InfoVis evaluation paradigms. The theoretical characterization posited that these supports are sequential and of dependent phases. Finally, based on the theoretical argument and the findings, an evaluation framework for InfoVis' decision support effectiveness is proposed, and the process of its experimental evaluation is suggested.