PNNL

Abstract

Although many in the community have advocated user-centered evaluations for visual analytic environments, a significant barrier exists. The users targeted by the visual analytics community (law enforcement personnel, professional information analysts, financial analysts, health care analysts, etc.) are often inaccessible to researchers. These analysts are extremely busy and their work environments and data are often classified or at least confidential. Furthermore, their tasks often last weeks or even months. It is simply not feasible to do such long-term observations to understand their jobs. How then can we hope to gather enough information about the diverse user populations to understand their needs? Some researchers have been successful in working with different end-users, including the author. A reasonable approach, therefore, would be to find a way to share user information. This paper outlines a proposal for developing a handbook of user profiles for use by researchers, developers, and evaluators.