Visualizations at First Sight: Do Insights Require Training?
USAB '08 Proceedings of the 4th Symposium of the Workgroup Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering of the Austrian Computer Society on HCI and Usability for Education and Work
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Time plays a key role in all aspects of the intelligence analysis process, from data ingest through analysis methods to the cognitive processes that create intelligence products. However, the concept of time is difficult to grasp and not yet fully understood. Today's analytic tools fall short of satisfying analysts' needs. These tools do not significantly facilitate an analyst's cognitive process because the implicit representation of time found in these tools and their visualizations curtail analysts' opportunities to exploit their data's time dimension. There is a need to revisit and understand the nature of the role time plays. This article briefly discusses why time is difficult to grasp, the need for visualizations and interactions to deal with time, and some thoughts about a temporal analytic discourse. Overall, time cannot be left as an afterthought when developing visualizations; time should be considered a first-class object in its own right, rather than an implicit attribute, and of course must be as interactively manipulable as any other object.