DashGuide: Authoring Interactive Dashboard Tours for Guiding Dashboard Users

Abstract: Dashboard guidance helps dashboard users better navigate interactive features, understand the underlying data, and assess insights they can potentially extract from dashboards. However, authoring dashboard guidance is a time consuming task, and embedding guidance into dashboards for effective delivery is difficult to realize. In this work, we contribute DashGuide, a framework and system to support the creation of interactive dashboard guidance with minimal authoring input. Given a dashboard and a communication goal, DashGuide captures a sequence of author-performed interactions to generate guidance materials delivered as playable step-by-step overlays, a.k.a., dashboard tours. Authors can further edit and refine individual tour steps while receiving generative assistance. We also contribute findings from a formative assessment with 9 dashboard creators, which helped inform the design of DashGuide; and findings from an evaluation of DashGuide with 12 dashboard creators, suggesting it provides an improved authoring experience that balances efficiency, expressiveness, and creative freedom.