Toward Constructing Frameworks for Task- and Design-Optimized Visualizations

Visualization is crucial to augment and enhance human understanding and decision-making in today’s data-driven world. However, the way data are visualized can influence and drastically change the conclusions people draw using data. The findings around visualization effectiveness are nuanced, and guidelines for effective visualization design depend on the visual channels used, chart types, and analysis tasks. This points to a significant need to understand the intersection of these factors to create optimized visualizations. We need a framework to define this intersection that fills the gap by providing a task-optimized visualization design for better quality and higher decision-making confidence that gives designers objective guidance. A task-optimized visualization design framework strategically integrates visual channels, visualization types, and specific low-level tasks to enhance data interpretation and optimize user task performance. We discuss constructing a visualization framework that considers both human perception for encoding techniques and the task being performed, enabling optimizing visualization design to maximize efficiency. Furthermore, we highlight a task-optimized framework’s impact and potential applications.