Usability of uncertainty visualisation methods : A comparison between different user groups

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a web based survey assessing the usability of main uncertainty visualisation methods for users belonging to different key domains such as GIS and Climate change research. We assess the usability of the visualisation methods based on the user's performance in selected learnability tasks, in addition to assessing user preferences. A correspondence analysis between these two results was further carried out to find the association between the user's performance and preference. The key outcome of our study is the ranking of uncertainty visualisation methods according to their suitability for different user domains, as tested for within our study. The gained results are a valuable basis for tools, such as our Uncertainty Visualisation Selector (described later) which can recommend the most appropriate uncertainty visualisation methods according to user defined requirements.