Construction Kit for Visual Exploration Interfaces

Although many novel approaches to exploring complex data sets exist, little guidance is available for novice designers and developers to start creating new solutions for specific use cases. The construction kit for visual exploration interfaces models the problem domain of product search. The building blocks define a design space, which describes all possible designs that can be created by combining these blocks.

The construction kit contains several building blocks that can be assigned to different dimensions of visual exploration interfaces. These building blocks can be combined to a pattern, which describes one part of a visual search interface. These patterns can be composed in a construction plan that enables the description of complex search interfaces. The construction process is supported by three different connectors: Successive (patterns are shown successively), Juxtaposed (patterns are shown next to each other), and Superimposed (patterns are combined with each other in one view).

The construction kit can be also used as workshop method and can be applied in two directions: bottom-up to develop novel visual interfaces and top-down to identify and analyze key aspects of existing interface solutions.