Capturing Reasoning Process through User Interaction

In recent years, visual analytics has taken an important role in solving many types of complex analytical problems that require deep and specific domain knowledge from users. While the analysis products generated by these expert users are of great importance, how these users apply their domain expertise in using the visualization to validate their hypotheses and arrive at conclusions is often just as invaluable. Recent research efforts in capturing an expert’s reasoning process using a visualization have shown that some of a user’s analysis process is indeed recoverable. However, there does not exist a generalizable principle that explains the success of these domainspecific systems in capturing the user’s reasoning process. In this paper, we present a framework that examines two aspects of the capturing process. First, we inspect how a user’s reasoning process can be captured by utilizing van Wijk’s operational model of visualization. Second, we evaluate the likelihood of success in capturing a user’s interactions in a visualization by introducing three criteria designed for disambiguating the meanings behind the interactions. Various visualization systems in the visualization and HCI communities are examined for the purpose of demonstrating the impact of the three criteria.