View relations: an exploratory study on between-view meta-visualizations

In this paper, we explore the potential of using visual representations to support people in managing, organizing, and understanding relations between multiple visualization views. Multiple views can help people understand different facets of data and data processing, and are a crucial part of data analysis particularly when it is done collaboratively. Both the growing use of multiple views and the increasing display sizes have amplified the need to explore how to better help people to understand the relations between many views. To improve our understanding of how to visualize view relations, we invited visualization and interaction designers to critique and sketch representations of view relations. The participants provided design critiques, and sketched their own relation representations. Our findings expand the range and palette of ways of visually linking visualization views and suggest new directions for designing view relation representations to better support analysis with multiple views.