Benefits of Information Visualization Systems for Administrative Data Analysts Victor González, Alfred Kobsa School of Information and Computer Science University of California, Irvine {vmgyg,kobsa}@ics.uci.edu Abstract 1 This paper reports results from a study on the adoption of an information visualization system by administrative data analysts. Despite the fact that the system was neither fully integrated with their current software tools nor with their existing data analysis practices, analysts identified a number of key benefits that visualization systems provide to their work. These benefits for the most part occurred when analysts went beyond their habitual and well-mastered data analysis routines and engaged in creative discovery processes. We analyze the conditions under which these benefits arose, to inform the design of visualization systems that can better assist the work of administrative data analysts. 1. Introduction Empirical studies of the benefits of information visualization systems have generally been designed as laboratory experiments (see [1] for an overview). Lab approaches allow one to maintain tight control over the experimental tasks and conditions, and thereby to identify and measure more precisely the effects of individual char- acteristics of visualization software. However, lab approaches are limited when we want to study how a system assists people in the context of actual professional work, rather than in isolated experimental tasks. Work- place studies and in situ observations are a better means to obtain a more comprehensive picture and to determine the critical factors that lead to the adoption of a system [4]. We decided to conduct such a situated study to reveal the benefits that data analysts obtain from using a visualization system in the context of their current work routines, data, and software infrastructure. Anecdotic evidence from vendors and developers indicates that data analysts envision clear benefits from information visualization systems as soon as they become 1 This research has been supported by the Center for Research on Infor- mation Technology and Organizations (CRITO), UC Irvine. introduced to them. They quickly understand that these systems can enhance their work by allowing them to view entire data sets, to flexibly manipulate data, and to easily turn findings into charts and reports. Our study confirms this anecdotic evidence but additionally indicates that these benefits are mainly achieved when analysts are driven to abandon their routine data analysis processes and to come to a new understanding of their data. In this paper, we present a number of cases in which analysts obtained clear benefits by using an information visualization system to support creative discovery processes. These benefits were achieved when subjects visually explored their data to discover new relationships, trends, and outliers. The administrative data analysts discovered that this kind of analysis was not common practice for them, and that their current tools did not support nor promote such practices. They had to find out how to conduct this kind of analysis, both with respect to doing it visually and the required depth of analysis. In the remainder of this paper, we will describe the participants of this study (Section 2) as well as the research methods (Section 3). In Section 4, we report that benefits mostly occurred when analysts departed from their routine data analysis, and describe three types of benefits that we observed. In Section 5 we substantiate our claims with a number of case studies. Section 6 finally discusses the results and presents some recommen- dations for the design of information visualization systems aimed at supporting the work of administrative data analysts. 2. Data analysts participating in our study Our subjects were five office workers who routinely use large amounts of numerical data on their jobs and were therefore likely to benefit from information visuali- zation systems. Four subjects came from different administrative units of the University of California, Irvine; the fifth works for a major U.S. aerospace company. The role of each subject is briefly described below. Sixth International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV03), London, U.K. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos, CA, forthcoming