Dynamic Design Documents for supporting applied visualization

A common characteristic of applied visualization is collaboration between visualization researcher and domain expert – where the visualization researcher attempts to assimilate sufficient detail around data, task and requirements to design a visualization tool that is manifestly useful. We report on a method for enabling such a collaboration that can be used throughout the design process to gather and develop requirements and continually evaluate and support iterative design. We do so using highly interactive web-pages that we term dynamic design documents. Applied during a four-year visual data analysis project for crime research, these documents enabled a series of data mappings to be explored by our collaborators (crime analysts) remotely – in a flexible and continuous way. We argue that they engendered a level of engagement that is qualitatively distinct from more traditional methods of feedback elicitation, offered a solution to limited and intermittent contact between analyst and visualization researcher and speculate that they provided a means of partially addressing certain intractable deficiencies, such as social desirability-bias, that are common to evaluation in applied data visualization.