Sketching Temporal Uncertainty - An Exploratory User Study

Abstract

Real world datasets frequently contain inherent uncertainty of some kind. Most of the work in the context of visualizing temporal uncertainty, focus on evaluating and comparing different visualization approaches. This effort may yield answers about the chosen techniques, but usually leaves the question open if there are other approaches, which would be more intuitive to the users. To answer this question, we conducted an exploratory user study. 32 participants were asked to draw sketches how they would visualize given scenarios about temporal uncertainty. The collected drawings were analyzed using an open coding approach. These results are presented and four hypotheses, meant to guide future research, are derived.