arXiv subjects

Mara Solen

Publications and source records attributed to Mara Solen.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

"It just kind of shows that I went somewhere": An Exploratory Study of Fitness Data Sharing

The sharing of curated fitness data posts occurs frequently on fitness-focused social platforms such as Strava and on general social media platforms such as Instagram, which is a novel context for visualization. To better understand the process of sharing and designing fitness data posts, as well as the role of visualization within them, we conduct a constructivist grounded theory study. We conduct and analyze 18 semi-structured interviews with fitness data sharers. From our analysis of the data, we find three novel characteristics of fitness data sharing: (i) the role of visualization as providing proof that an individual did an activity, (ii) the importance of expressing individuality in posts, and (iii) design conformity to cultural norms. We also derive a set of design implications, including a need for more options for visualizations for activities without routes, more user control in fitness data sharing platforms, and maintained ease of use while increasing customization options.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Considering Contribution Statements in Visualization and HCI Research

Contribution statements are an increasingly common way to make research labor visible, reduce academic malfeasance, and provide broader transparency. Despite this potential value, they remain uncommon in visualization and HCI. To explore this gap, we conducted an online study with (N=21) visualization and HCI researchers. We find a range of differing opinions about the utility of contribution statements, which are set against a background of tensions relating to contribution frameworks that inadequately fit contribution types in HCI and especially visualization, power dynamics between authors, bias in authorship perceptions, and the tedium of providing yet another form of documentation. From these factors, we offer a modest recommendation to authors: consider contribution statements. There are contexts when they may usefully explicate work, and others where they can cause author-team conflict or become a burdensome chore. Regardless of whether they are used by readers or not, we suggest that scaffolded mechanisms for reflecting on contribution roles are valuable both for public accountability and internal alignment. To institutions, we recommend that contribution statements be exempt from page or word limits, and that flexible templates and examples be provided to authors, but that they continue to not be required. By surfacing these perspectives, we seek to open a dialogue about what constitutes authorship, how our community might move toward more equitable and transparent attribution practices, and where the visualization and HCI communities might be uniquely equipped to help.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

VIVA: Virtual Healthcare Interactions Using Visual Analytics, With Controllability Through Configuration

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, HealthLink BC (HLBC) rapidly integrated physicians into the triage process of their virtual healthcare service to improve patient outcomes and satisfaction with this service and preserve health care system capacity. We present the design and implementation of a visual analytics tool, VIVA (Virtual healthcare Interactions using Visual Analytics), to support HLBC in analysing various forms of usage data from the service. We abstract HLBC's data and data analysis tasks, which we use to inform our design of VIVA. We also present the interactive workflow abstraction of Scan, Act, Adapt. We validate VIVA's design through three case studies with stakeholder domain experts. We also propose the Controllability Through Configuration model to conduct and analyze design studies, and discuss architectural evolution of VIVA through that lens. It articulates configuration, both that specified by a developer or technical power user and that constructed automatically through log data from previous interactive sessions, as a bridge between the rigidity of hardwired programming and the time-consuming implementation of full end-user interactivity. Availability: Supplemental materials at https://osf.io/wv38n

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

A Design Space for Multiscale Visualization

Designing multiscale visualizations, particularly when the ratio between the largest scale and the smallest item is large, can be challenging, and designers have developed many approaches to overcome this challenge. We present a design space for visualization with multiple scales. The design space includes three dimensions, with eight total subdimensions. We demonstrate its descriptive power by using it to code approaches from a corpus we compiled of 52 examples, created by a mix of academics and practitioners. We demonstrate descriptive power by analyzing and partitioning these examples into four high-level strategies for designing multiscale visualizations, which are shared approaches with respect to design space dimension choices. We demonstrate generative power by analyzing missed opportunities within the corpus of examples, identified through analysis of the design space, where we note how certain examples could have benefited from different choices. We discuss patterns in the use of different dimension and strategy choices in the different visualization contexts of analysis and presentation. Supplemental materials: https://osf.io/wbrdm/ Design space website: https://marasolen.github.io/multiscale-vis-ds/

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

DeLVE into Earth's Past: A Visualization-Based Exhibit Deployed Across Multiple Museum Contexts

While previous work has found success in deploying visualizations as museum exhibits, it has not investigated whether museum context impacts visitor behaviour with these exhibits. We present an interactive Deep-time Literacy Visualization Exhibit (DeLVE) to help museum visitors understand deep time (lengths of extremely long geological processes) by improving proportional reasoning skills through comparison of different time periods. DeLVE uses a new visualization idiom, Connected Multi-Tier Ranges, to visualize curated datasets of past events across multiple scales of time, relating extreme scales with concrete scales that have more familiar magnitudes and units. Museum staff at three separate museums approved the deployment of DeLVE as a digital kiosk, and devoted time to curating a unique dataset in each of them. We collect data from two sources, an observational study and system trace logs. We discuss the importance of context: similar museum exhibits in different contexts were received very differently by visitors. We additionally discuss differences in our process from Sedlmair et al.'s design study methodology which is focused on design studies triggered by connection with collaborators rather than the discovery of a concept to communicate. Supplemental materials are available at: https://osf.io/z53dq/

cs.HC↗