BiasBuzz: Combining Visual Guidance with Haptic Feedback to Increase Awareness of Analytic Behavior during Visual Data Analysis

During visual data analysis, users may inadvertently focus more on certain aspects of data, affecting analysis outcome(s). Existing tools primarily rely on visual cues (e.g., highlight already visited data) to increase user awareness of such analytic behaviors. We believe this single, visual modality is a passive form of guidance that adds to users' cognitive load already engaged in analysis. We investigate how a dual modality (visual guidance and haptic feedback) can capture users' attention and more actively guide them in their pursuits. We interface an existing visual data analysis tool with a gaming mouse. This enhanced system tracks user interactions and communicates biases by vibrating the mouse (haptic) and simultaneously displaying contextual information in the tool (visual). A formative study with nine users revealed that this dual modality increased analytical awareness in some cases but some users found the haptic mouse vibrations to be distracting and disturbing, informing the design of future multimodal user interfaces.