A user-centered design methodology for students' data-focused InfoVis

Abstract

Actualization of user-centered information system with tasks and functionalities that duly addresses users' needs had been a motivating force for researches in user-centered design (UCD) generally. In designing Information Visualization (InfoVis), UCD models and methodologies have been adapted to address the peculiarity and diverse domain specifics of InfoVis. This UCD models' adaptation has been done in geovisualization, spatiotemporal InfoVis, biological data visualization, among others, with none on students' data focused InfoVis, despite the domain users' peculiarities. Furthermore, our study on actualization of higher education institutions (HEIs) students' data-focused InfoVis observes the incompatibility of the existing InfoVis UCD models of past related studies with the actualization of HEI domain-specific InfoVis. This incompatibility is arguably traceable to the peculiarity of the domain InfoVis users-data administrators, data analysts, the policy administrators and decision makers. Due to our work field experience, and objective argument from literatures reviewed, we employed a comparative content analysis and in-depth critique methods to modify the existing InfoVis UCD methodologies so as to feature additional stages to comply with our domain specificity. This study therefore presents a modified InfoVis UCD methodology that attends to the observed limitations of the previous works, and finally, our work in progress is presented.