Understanding system features through information visualisations to improve product development: an exploratory study with data analysts

Information visualisations, such as diagrams and charts, support analysis of large amounts of information. As product development is increasingly becoming digitalised and while an abundance of information presents challenges, there are also increasing opportunities for engineers to become even more data-savvy and to leverage the power of information visualisations. While there exist various information visualisations for decision support in product development, these representations are often being created in an ad-hoc manner and often specifically for each task. This becomes particularly challenging in systems-oriented design where multiple domains and views need integration. In this paper, we examine whether certain types of information visualisations facilitate understanding of characteristic features of systems, such as hierarchy, relationships, patterns and processes. Results from our study with data analysts suggest that information visualisations are recognised as representing the aforementioned characteristic system features, even by study participants without prior familiarity with the visualisations used, i.e. network diagram, treemap, Sankey diagram, co-occurrence matrix, and treemap.