BELIV'06: Beyond time and errors; Novel evaluation methods for information visualization

The issues taken into account in BELIV'06, a workshop about evaluation in information visualization, are discussed. The workshop focused on importance of good information visualization (InfoVis). Good information visualization provides users with accurate visual representations of data as well as powerful interaction tools that facilitate exploration, understanding, and discovery. InfoVis is successful when users can gather new, nontrivial insights, a process that takes place over days or months and can rarely be simulated with series of short tasks. Researchers highlighted the benefit of having InfoVis heuristics and the challenges of having too many heuristics. They also proposed to adapt an established methodology called AT for abstract tasks methodology to the visualization domain. Participants were satisfied with the workshop format and content for the development of a formal infrastructure to support research on evaluation methods, encourage collaboration, provide benchmarks datasets, and share results.