We designed and implemented InvestChat, a multimodal tablet-based application that supports stock market exploration with multiple coordinated views and an LLM-powered chat. We evaluated the application with 12 novice investors. Our findings suggest that combining natural language, touch, and pen input during stock market exploration facilitates user engagement. Participants leveraged the modalities in complementary ways, enjoying the freedom of choice and finding natural language most effective.

We characterize 16 challenges faced by those investigating and developing remote and synchronous collaborative experiences around visualization. Our work reflects the perspectives and prior research efforts of an international group of 29 experts from across human-computer interaction and visualization sub-communities. The challenges are anchored around five collaborative activities that exhibit a centrality of visualization and multimodal communication. These activities include exploratory data analysis, creative ideation, visualization-rich presentations, joint decision making grounded in data, and real-time data monitoring. The challenges also reflect the changing dynamics of these activities in the face of recent advances in extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI). As an organizing scheme for future research at the intersection of visualization and computer-supported cooperative work, we align the challenges with a sequence of four sets of research and development activities: technological choices, social factors, AI assistance, and evaluation.

Visualization dashboards are regularly used for data exploration and analysis, but their complex interactions and interlinked views often require time-consuming onboarding sessions from dashboard authors. Preparing these onboarding materials is labor-intensive and requires manual updates when dashboards change. Recent advances in multimodal interaction powered by large language models (LLMs) provide ways to support self-guided onboarding. We present Diana (Dashboard Interactive Assistant for Navigation and Analysis), a multimodal dashboard assistant that helps users for navigation and guided analysis through chat, audio, and mouse-based interactions. Users can choose any interaction modality or a combination of them to onboard themselves on the dashboard. Each modality highlights relevant dashboard features to support user orientation. Unlike typical LLM systems that rely solely on text-based chat, Diana combines multiple modalities to provide explanations directly in the dashboard interface. We conducted a comparative qualitative user study to understand the use of different modalities for different types of onboarding tasks and their complexities.

This paper presents a theoretical model for interactive visualization literacy to describe how people use interactive data visualizations and systems. Literacies have become an important concept in describing modern life skills, with visualization literacy generally referring to the use and interpretation of data visualizations. However, prior work on visualization literacy overlooks interaction and its associated challenges, despite it being an intrinsic aspect of using visualizations. Based on existing theoretical frameworks, we derive a two-dimensional model that combines four well-known literacies with five novel ones. We found evidence for our model through analyzing existing visualization systems as well as through observations from an exploratory study involving such systems. We conclude by outlining steps towards measuring, evaluating, designing for, and teaching interactive visualization literacy.

We present the results of an exploratory study on how pairs interact with speech commands and touch gestures on a wall-sized display during a collaborative sensemaking task. Previous work has shown that speech commands, alone or in combination with other input modalities, can support visual data exploration by individuals. However, it is still unknown whether and how speech commands can be used in collaboration, and for what tasks. To answer these questions, we developed a functioning prototype that we used as a technology probe. We conducted an in-depth exploratory study with 10 participant pairs to analyze their interaction choices, the interplay between the input modalities, and their collaboration. While touch was the most used modality, we found that participants preferred speech commands for global operations, used them for distant interaction, and that speech interaction contributed to the awareness of the partner's actions. Furthermore, the likelihood of using speech commands during collaboration was related to the personality trait of agreeableness. Regarding collaboration styles, participants interacted with speech equally often whether they were in loosely or closely coupled collaboration. While the partners stood closer to each other during close collaboration, they did not distance themselves to use speech commands. From our findings, we derive and contribute a set of design considerations for collaborative and multimodal interactive data analysis systems. All supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/8gpv2.

We examined user preferences to combine multiple interaction modalities for collaborative interaction with data shown on large vertical displays. Large vertical displays facilitate visual data exploration and allow the use of diverse interaction modalities by multiple users at different distances from the screen. Yet, how to offer multiple interaction modalities is a non-trivial problem. We conducted an elicitation study with 20 participants that generated 1015 interaction proposals combining touch, speech, pen, and mid-air gestures. Given the opportunity to interact using these four modalities, participants preferred speech interaction in 10 of 15 low-level tasks and direct manipulation for straightforward tasks such as showing a tooltip or selecting. In contrast to previous work, participants most favored unimodal and personal interactions. We identified what we call collaborative synonyms among their interaction proposals and found that pairs of users collaborated either unimodally and simultaneously or multimodally and sequentially. We provide insights into how end-users associate visual exploration tasks with certain modalities and how they collaborate at different interaction distances using specific interaction modalities. The supplemental material is available at https://osf.io/m8zuh/?view only = 34bfd907d2ed43bbbe37027fdf46a3fa.

Abstract Mobile devices are increasingly being used in the workplace. The combination of touch, pen, and speech interaction with mobile devices is considered particularly promising for a more natural experience. However, we do not yet know how everyday work with multimodal data visualizations on a mobile device differs from working in the standard WIMP workplace setup. To address this gap, we created a visualization system for social scientists, with a WIMP interface for desktop PCs, and a multimodal interface for tablets. The system provides visualizations to explore spatio‐temporal data with consistent WIMP and multimodal interaction techniques. To investigate how the different combinations of devices and interaction modalities affect the performance and experience of domain experts in a work setting, we conducted an experiment with 16 social scientists where they carried out a series of tasks with both interfaces. Participants were significantly faster and slightly more accurate on the WIMP interface. They solved the tasks with different strategies according to the interaction modalities available. The pen was the most used and appreciated input modality. Most participants preferred the multimodal setup and could imagine using it at work. We present our findings, together with their implications for the interaction design of data visualizations.

Abstract Co‐creation is a design method where designers and domain experts work together to develop a product. In this paper, we present and evaluate the use of co‐creation to design a visual information system with social science researchers in order to explore and analyze their data. Co‐creation proposes involving the future users in the design process to ensure that they play a critical role in the design, and to increase the chances of long‐term adoption. We evaluated the co‐creation process through surveys, interviews and a user study. According to the participants’ feedback, they felt listened to through co‐creation, and considered the methodology helpful to develop visualizations that support their research in the near future. However, participation was far from perfect, particularly early career researchers showed limited interest in participating because they did not see the process as beneficial for their research publication goals. We summarize benefits and limitations of co‐creation, together with our recommendations, as lessons learned.

Abstract This paper presents a short‐contact multitouch vocabulary for interacting with scatterplot matrices (SPLOMs) on wall‐sized displays. Fling‐based gestures overcome central interaction challenges of such large displays by avoiding long swipes on the typically blunt surfaces, frequent physical navigation by walking for accessing screen areas beyond arm's reach in the horizontal direction and uncomfortable postures for accessing screen areas in the vertical direction. Furthermore, we make use of the display's high resolution and large size by supporting the efficient specification of two‐tiered focus + context regions which are consistently propagated across the SPLOM. These techniques are complemented by axis‐centered and lasso‐based selection techniques for specifying subsets of the data. An expert review as well as a user study confirmed the potential and general usability of our seamlessly integrated multitouch interaction techniques for SPLOMs on large vertical displays.