Visualizing Discovery Paths

Abstract: Business intelligence (BI) is all about making decisions. The purpose of many business intelligence tools is to improve these decisions by making data easy to visualize and understand. Qlik Sense is a BI tool developed by the company Qlik which allows users to visualize and explore data by filtering it (called making selections). At the time of this project Qlik Sense did not support visualization of a user’s selection history. Hence, users were not able to share their path to discovery. This project aimed to find and implement the most suitable way of solving that problem. Here we show, taking user and expert feedback into consideration, that a suitable way of visualizing discovery paths is done as a tree representation of the selections made by the user. In order to create the final product an iterative approach based on user-centered design (UCD) was used. Initially a brainstorming session was held which resulted several concepts to help produce low-fidelity prototypes. Based on heuristic evaluations and user tests, these prototypes resulted in the final product implemented as a part of Qlik Sense. Furthermore, the result of this project forms a well working solution and a solid foundation for further development towards a complete product.