Framework characterizes user skills needed for making charts
The CAPED Framework: Characterizing User Skills in Chart Authoring through the Lens of Tasks and Tools
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Making charts involves many different skills, but no clear way existed to describe what these skills are. The authors created a framework called CAPED that breaks down the skills needed to create charts into five parts related to the data, the chart output, the style, the level of detail, and the personal expression involved. This framework helps explain how people use different skills for similar chart-making tasks and highlights the types of knowledge needed. It can also guide the design of better tools for people with different skill levels.
What this means in practice
- •For visualization tool designers: Create chart authoring systems that better match the varied user skills identified in the CAPED framework.
- •For business intelligence developers: Develop data visualization features that support users’ differing abilities in managing input data and expressing insights through charts.
A position paper. It proposes an approach and reports no results.
Authors
Bongshin Lee, Zhicheng Liu, John Thompson, Chenglong Wang
Abstract
In this paper, we introduce a new framework for characterizing the user skills required for chart authoring. Despite growing attention to authoring systems, we lack a conceptual framework that characterizes the diverse and multifaceted skills involved and helps identify opportunities for system design and development. Our initial investigation revealed that skill is a complex and elusive concept, and that existing theories on skills from other disciplines are too high-level to capture the importance of tasks and tools in data visualizations. To address this gap, we formulate the CAPED framework that characterizes skill as the ability to create a chart involving five dimensions pertinent to tasks and tools: input data, output chart, paradigm, abstraction, and expression. We demonstrate the framework's descriptive power by highlighting different skills involved in similar authoring situations and identifying the types of knowledge associated with chart authoring. We further present examples illustrating how the framework can be used to identify new research opportunities in supporting users with varying skills.