Towards Characterizing Visualizations

Abstract : The ability to characterize visualizations would bring several benefits to the design process. It would help designers to assess their designs, reuse existing designs in new contexts, communicate with other designers and write compact and unambiguous specifications. The research described in this paper is an initial effort to develop a theory-driven approach to the characterization of visualizations. We examine the Card and Mackinlay characterization tool and we show its limitations when it comes to performing a complete characterization.