A Graphical Workflow Exploration Environment For Visual Analytics

Abstract: Graphical history mechanisms have been widely utilized in many domains to support humans' limited working memory, error recovery, collaboration, and presentation in visual analysis. Yet, there are aspects that remain under-explored in designing graphical history systems for visual analytics systems to help analysts who have complicated workflows. In this paper we report on our design study performed with domain experts, where we characterize domain tasks and designed a visual graphical workflow management environment. Our environment allows analysts to efficiently review, edit, navigate, and explore their complex workflows with their colleagues. In order to evaluate the environment, we present a case study and user study. In the case study, we explore how two domain experts perform collaborative review, communication, and training with our environment; while in the user study with the car data, we reveal that how our environment helps users and how the history mechanism affects users' visual problem-solving behaviors.