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Usability Heuristic Evaluation of Scientific Data Analysis and Visualization Tools

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Advances in Usability and User Experience (AHFE 2017)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 607))

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Abstract

Scientific data analysis and visualization (DAV) tools are a critical component of the software ecosystem. The growth in data volumes in various scientific domains is resulting in technical innovations in DAV tools. Usability of these tools is becoming extremely critical to facilitate next-generation scientific discoveries. Usability heuristics is a widely applied approach to inspect software usability. We expand Nielsen’s heuristics to include two additional criteria: analytical-reasoning and customized-experience to capture the usability dimensions of DAV tools. We evaluated three tools to test the proposed heuristics and demonstrate its fit to DAV tools of varying features. The contribution of our work is threefold: (i) identify DAV usability heuristics, (ii) develop a framework to inspect DAV tools, (iii) conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the usability of selected DAV tools. We also provide a discussion on the heuristics framework for DAV tools and future work.

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Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research under Award Number(s) DE-AC02-05CH11231, program manager Lucy Nowell.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Math and Computer Science, Philander Smith College, Little Rock, AR, USA

    Samar Swaid & Mnsa Maat

  2. Data Science and Technology Department, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Hari Krishnan, Devarshi Ghoshal & Lavanya Ramakrishnan

Authors
  1. Samar Swaid
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  2. Mnsa Maat
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  3. Hari Krishnan
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  4. Devarshi Ghoshal
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  5. Lavanya Ramakrishnan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Samar Swaid .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Central Florida , Orlando, Florida, USA

    Tareq Ahram

  2. Catholic University of Pernambuco , Boa Vista, Recife, Brazil

    Christianne Falcão

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Swaid, S., Maat, M., Krishnan, H., Ghoshal, D., Ramakrishnan, L. (2018). Usability Heuristic Evaluation of Scientific Data Analysis and Visualization Tools. In: Ahram, T., Falcão, C. (eds) Advances in Usability and User Experience. AHFE 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 607. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60492-3_45

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60492-3_45

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-60491-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-60492-3

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