Visual Thinking Design Patterns.

In visual analytics, interactive data visualizations provide a bridge between analytic computations, often involving “big data”, and computations in the brain of the user. Visualization provides a high bandwidth channel from the computer to the user by means of the visual display, with interactions including brushing, dynamic queries, and generalized fisheye views designed to select and control what is shown. In this paper we introduce Visual Thinking Design Patterns (VTDPs) as part of a methodology for producing cognitively efficient designs. We describe their main components, including epistemic actions (actions to seek knowledge) and visual queries (pattern searches that provide a whole or partial solution to a problem). We summarize the set of 20 VTDPs we have identified so far and show how they can be used in a design methodology. Keywords—design patterns, visual thinking, data visualization, visual analytics.