“ Show Me Data . ” Observational Study of a Conversational Interface in Visual Data Exploration

Visual data exploration poses challenges for ’InfoVis Novices’. A ’conversational interface’ which would enable users to generate and interact with visualizations through natural language and gestures, while maintaining a history of the data exploration, has the potential to ameliorate many of these challenges. We performed an exploratory, observational study designed to examine the role of such a conversational interface in visual data exploration. We simulated a conversational interface, using a remote human mediator, with multiple cycles of visualization construction. We believe analysis of this data will yield concrete design goals for conversational interfaces in information visualization.