A matter of time: Applying a data–users–tasks design triangle to visual analytics of time-oriented data

Increasing amounts of data offer great opportunities to promote technological progress and business success. Visual analytics (VA) aims at enabling the exploration and the understanding of large and complex data sets by intertwining interactive visualization, data analysis, human–computer interaction, as well as cognitive and perceptual science. We propose a design triangle, which considers three main aspects to ease the design: (1) the characteristics of the data, (2) the users, and (3) the users' tasks. Addressing the particular characteristics of time and time-oriented data focuses the VA methods, but turns the design space into a more complex and challenging one. We demonstrate the applicability of the design triangle by three use cases tackling the time-oriented aspects explicitly. Our design triangle provides a high-level framework, which is simple and very effective for the design process as well as easily applicable for both, researchers and practitioners.