Making Decisions With Visualizations

For many decisions in our personal and professional lives, computing has made it easy to compile large numbers of options to choose from. With no objectively optimal solution present, identifying the best solution requires our human judgment to trade off conflicting goals. Data visualization is a powerful tool to help us explore and make sense of available courses of action. While many interactive visualizations already live in the context of decision-making, how to design for humans who make decisions with visualized data continues to be a vibrant research area. In this talk, I will share some ideas on how we can describe decision activities, design visualization tools for their support and validate their usefulness under real-world conditions. Through case studies, I will show how our visualizations helped users apply their preferences to balance the levels of performance that are achievable under different conditions. Finally, I will share my thoughts on future research directions that emerge in this area.