Web UX | Visualization Tools Browser for All

This study involved designing and implementing a web application for browsing and searching online data visualisation tools. Data visualisation is becoming an indispensable process in industry and academia and data visualisation tools are emerging and developing rapidly. Data visualisation tools help users to understand and analyse data. These tools have various characteristics and are designed for different data visualisation tasks, so it is important to choose an appropriate data visualisation tool. However, it is very difficult for users to navigate the huge data visualisation landscape. This study aims to help users browse and search data visualisation tools.
The web application developed during this research is an improved version of the previous VisBroswser (https://vistools.net/), which is an online collection of data visualisation tools. The previous version of the VisBrowser was not evaluated by users and user research suggested that the user experience (UX) required improvement. This study focused on improving the UX of the web application because a good UX can help users to operate the application better and more easily find an appropriate data visualisation tool. A mixed-method (sequential explanatory) user research survey was conducted with real users (Creswell et al. 2003). A total of 30 participants responded to the web UX questionnaire and 6 of them took part in semi-structured interviews. User research was carried out remotely due to the COVID-19 crisis. An online concurrent think-aloud (CTA) method was used in remote interviews. This method is rarely used remotely but has achieved valid results in this research.

Design decisions were made based on user research and brainstorming. A new feature called ''Gallery” was added to the application to allow users to upload and view examples of data visualisations, which could inspire users to explore the landscape of data visualisation tools. In addition, the new version of the VisBrowser (introduction video https://vistoolsbrowser.webflow.io/, https://youtu.be/olstyIIbyOs) was evaluated by users and adjustments have been made in light of their feedback.