Recovering Reasoning Process From User Interactions

With visual analytical tools becoming more sophisticated and prevalent in the analysis communities, it is now apparent that understanding how analysts utilize these tools is more important than ever. Such understanding can lead to improving the tools, but a more subtle and equally important aspect lies in the discovery of the analysts’ reasoning process for solving complex problems through the use of these visual analytical tools. In this paper we demonstrate that we were able to identify several of the strategies, methods, and findings of an analysis process using a financial visual analytical tool through the examination of an analyst’s interaction log. In our study, we recorded the interactions and think-alouds of 10 financial analysts in a fraud detection task. By examining their interaction logs, we are able to quantitatively show that 60% of strategies, 60% of methods, and 79% of findings could be recovered through the use of two visual analytic log analysis tools.