From Exploration to Explanation: Designing for Visual Data Storytelling

Abstract

Past research in visualization has focused on supporting rapid analysis and exploration of data, involving comparing different visual representations for perceptual effectiveness and building usable analytic systems for domain experts. As data is becoming much more ubiquitous and relevant to our daily lives in recent years, there has been a growing need for communicating data to a general audience. However, many visualization tools still lack support for communication that ranges from adding simple annotations to customizing visualizations and constructing stories. These explanatory components can significantly aid understanding and recall of information compared to traditional exploratory visualizations. Due to the absence of such support in existing visualization tools, people still rely on graphic design tools that do not have data-driven abstractions, requiring time-consuming and error-prone manual encoding procedures. This thesis investigates how to enable individuals to design expressive visual data stories through a series of interactive systems. The first, Data-Driven Guides, provides data abstraction into a flexible design environment in which users can generate guides from data and draw custom shapes with the help of the guides. The second system, DataSelfie brings the expressivity of DDG into a personal context by allowing users to create a visual vocabulary to represent their personal data. Moving beyond the generation of a single visualization, DataToon offers fluid comic storyboarding by blending exploration and explanation in a unified environment supported by pen and touch interactions. Lastly, story curves allow storytellers to quickly grasp the narrative structure of a story by visualizing how events are temporally arranged. The fundamental idea of this thesis is to go beyond traditional exploratory visualizations to create expressive, explanatory, and personal visual stories. The resulting systems establish a research framework where presentation and storytelling is a core part of visual data systems.