Evaluating the Dot-Based Contingency Wheel: Results from an Interview Study

The dot-based Contingency Wheel is an interactive visual-analytics method designed to discover and analyze positive associations in an asymmetrically large n x m contingency table. Such tables summarize the relation between two categorical variables and arise in both scientific and business domains. This paper presents the results of a pilot evaluation study based on interviews conducted with ten users to assess both the conceptual design as well as the usability and utility of the dot-based Contingency Wheel. The results illustrate that the Wheel as a metaphor has some advantages, especially its interactive features and ability to provide an overview or large tables. On the other hand, we found major issues with this metaphor, especially how it represents the relations between the variables. Based on these results, the metaphor was redesigned as Contingency Wheel++, which uses simplified and more familiar visual representations to tackle the major issues we identified.