DESIGNING USER-ADAPTIVE INFORMATION DASHBOARDS: CONSIDERING LIMITED ATTENTION AND WORKING MEMORY

Business intelligence systems provide information dashboards that aim to assist decision-makers in understanding business situations and consequently support in decision making. They typically include compressed visual information to raise data exploration from different perspectives. Although information visualization is known as a possible solution to overcome human cognitive limitations such as attention and working memory, we do not know much about existing cognitive challenges of users when performing data exploration tasks using information dashboards. In this paper, we present the results of an eye-tracking experiment to study the impact of attention and working memory limitations on the effectiveness of dashboards. For that, we explicitly considered visuospatial working memory capacity (WMC) as one critical individual difference and investigated how users with different visuospatial WMC allocate attentional resources while conducting data exploration task. We found that both users with high and low visuospatial WMC have difficulties to control their attentional resources. However, these difficulties are more for users with low visuospatial WMC in compare with high WMC. Our results highlighted the need for designing user-adaptive information dashboards. Therefore, we articulated meta-requirements for designing information dashboards that are sensitive to the attention and WMC of their users as two central components of information processing theory.