Evaluation of Parallel Coordinates: Overview, Categorization and Guidelines for Future Research

The parallel coordinates technique is widely used for the analysis of multivariate data. During recent decades significant research efforts have been devoted to exploring the applicability of the technique and to expand upon it, resulting in a variety of extensions. Of these many research activities, a surprisingly small number concerns user-centred evaluations investigating actual use and usability issues for different tasks, data and domains. The result is a clear lack of convincing evidence to support and guide uptake by users as well as future research directions. To address these issues this paper contributes a thorough literature survey of what has been done in the area of user-centred evaluation of parallel coordinates. These evaluations are divided into four categories based on characterization of use, derived from the survey. Based on the data from the survey and the categorization combined with the authors' experience of working with parallel coordinates, a set of guidelines for future research directions is proposed.