An exploratory study of how abundant display space may support data analysis

Large, high-resolution displays offer new opportunities for visualizing and interacting with data. However, interaction techniques for such displays mostly support window manipulation and pointing, ignoring many activities involved in data analysis. We report on 11 workshops with data analysts from various fields, including artistic photography, phone log analysis, astrophysics, and health care policy. Analysts were asked to walk through recent tasks using actual data on a large whiteboard, imagining it to be a large display. From the resulting comments and a video analysis of behavior in the workshops, we generate ideas for new interaction techniques for large displays. These ideas include supporting sequences of visualizations with backtracking and fluid exploration of alternatives; using distance to the display to change visualizations; and fixing variables and data sets on the display or relative to the user.