User-centered design and agency in interactive data visualizations

Interactive data visualizations facilitate user exploration of information and can offer insight into patterns and relationships within the data. Nevertheless, the user's experience is constrained by the rhetorical choices of the visualization designers. Most scholarship on the relationship between user, interface, and designer focuses on how agency is shared between designer and user within the visualization interface. This paper focuses on an additional site in which user agency may occur: during visualization development. A user-centered development process involving audience engagement and co-creation can provide an additional space in which to negotiate agency. This paper envisions how this process might work, focusing on one example of user collaboration in the development of an interactive visualization for communicating about risks associated with sea-level rise. It outlines decisions made by developers regarding interface design, data selection, and risk scenario parameters, illustrates pathways by which users have participated in the design process, and describes how user feedback has helped shape the ultimate interaction space. Implications for the development of other interactive visualizations are discussed.