Toward a Unified Framework for Visualization Design Guidelines

Abstract

Visualizations are now widely adopted across disciplines, providing effective means to understand and communicate data. However, people still frequently create misleading visualizations that distort the underlying data and ultimately misinform the audience. While design guidelines exist, they are currently scattered across different sources and devised by different people, often missing design trade-offs in different contexts and providing inconsistent and conflicting design knowledge to visualization practitioners. Our goal in this work is to investigate the ontology of visualization design guidelines and derive a unified framework for structuring the guidelines. We collected existing guidelines on the web and analyzed them using the grounded theory approach. We describe the current landscape of the available guidelines and propose a structured template for describing visualization design guidelines.