What Makes for Effective Visualisation in Cyber Situational Awareness for Non-Expert Users?

As cyber threats continue to become more prevalent, there is a need to consider how best we can understand the cyber landscape when acting online, especially so for non-expert users. Satellite navigation systems provide the de facto standard for many modern day navigation tasks in the physical domain, so we consider the question of how one could navigate the online domain using similar concepts. In this paper, we study the design of a cyber sat nav for improving situational awareness of nonexpert users. We focus on three core tasks: understanding where we are in cyber space, understanding how we got there, and understanding future states that we may traverse to. To support understanding, we explore the use of visualisation techniques to portray complex online activities in clear and engaging formats for non-expert users.