Experiences and challenges with evaluation methods in practice: a case study

The development of information visualizations for companies poses specific challenges, especially for evaluation processes. It is advisable to test these visualizations under realistic circumstances. Because of various constraints, this can be quite difficult. In this paper, we discuss three different methods which can be used to conduct evaluations in companies. These methods are appropriate for different stages in the software life cycle (design phase, development, deployment) and reflect an iterative approach in evaluation. Based on an overview of available evaluation methods we argue that this combination of fairly lightweight methods is especially appropriate for evaluations of information visualizations in companies. These methods complement each other and emphasize different aspects of the evaluation. Based on this case study, we try to generalize our lessons learned from our experiences of conducting evaluations in this context.