Characterizing Exploratory Behaviors on a Personal Visualization Interface Using Interaction Logs

Personal visualizations present a separate class of visualizations where users interact with their own data to draw inferences about themselves. In this paper, we study how a realistic understanding of personal visualizations can be gained from analyzing user interactions. We designed an interface presenting visualizations of the personal data gathered in a prior study and logged interactions from 369 participants as they each explored their own data. We found that the participants spent different amounts of time in exploring their data and used a variety of physical devices which could have affected their engagement with the visualizations. Our findings also suggest that the participants made more comparisons between their data instances than with the provided baselines and certain interface design choices, such as the ordering of options, influenced their exploratory behaviors.