Understanding User Experience of COVID-19 Maps through Remote
Elicitation Interviews
Abstract
During the coronavirus pandemic, visualizations gained a new level of
popularity and meaning for a wider audience. People were bombarded with
a wide set of public health visualizations ranging from simple graphs to
complex interactive dashboards. In a pandemic setting, where large
amounts of the world population are socially distancing themselves, it
becomes an urgent need to refine existing user experience evaluation
methods for remote settings to understand how people make sense out of
COVID-19 related visualizations. When evaluating visualizations aimed
towards the general public with vastly different socio-demographic
backgrounds and varying levels of technical savviness and data literacy,
it is important to understand user feedback beyond aspects such as
speed, task accuracy, or usability problems. As a part of this wider
evaluation perspective, micro-phenomenology has been used to evaluate
static and narrative visualizations to reveal the lived experience in a
detailed way. Building upon these studies, we conducted a user study to
understand how to employ Elicitation (aka Micro-phenomenological)
interviews in remote settings. In a case study, we investigated what
experiences the participants had with map-based interactive
visualizations. Our findings reveal positive and negative aspects of
conducting Elicitation interviews remotely. Our results can inform the
process of planning and executing remote Elicitation interviews to
evaluate interactive visualizations. In addition, we share
recommendations regarding visualization techniques and interaction
design about public health data.