Design and Comparative Evaluation of Visualization Onboarding Methods

Comprehending and exploring large and complex data is becoming increasingly important for a diverse population of users in a wide range of application domains. Visualization has proven to be well-suited in supporting this endeavor by tapping into the power of human visual perception. However, non-experts in the field of visual analysis often have difficulties in correctly reading and interpreting information from novel visualization idioms. Visualization onboarding can support novices in learning how to use new digital technologies. Therefore, we developed an interactive step-by-step guide and applied the method to four visualization techniques—a bar chart, a horizon graph, a change matrix, and a parallel coordinates plot. Results using Amazon Mechanical Turk workers show that there is a need for onboarding, especially for more complex visualization techniques. We further investigated the perception and rating of a scrollytelling and a video tutorial for the most unfamiliar visualization—the parallel coordinates plot. A comparison between the three onboarding methods indicates that participants appreciated the easy-to-understand examples, the precise wording of the onboarding messages in a step-by-step manner, and the introduction of interaction concepts by highlighting the most relevant information over all onboarding methods. The video tutorial supported the introduction of unknown interaction techniques best.