Tasks to Tease Apart Scatterplot Design Decisions

Design Decisions Procedure Scatterplots are among the most common methods for exploring and presenting data, covering a wide range of tasks and designs. The variety of scatterplot designs has created a proliferation of potential design decisions to consider when constructing a scatterplot. However, there remain many unexamined assumptions in respect to the trade-offs between these decisions. Here, we begin the process of synthesizing recent work to build descriptive knowledge of how design decisions affect the analysis tasks viewers perform with scatterplots. Through deriving twelve abstracted scatterplot tasks, we can start to tease apart the different affordances of design decisions, and begin to formulate a basis for prescriptive scatterplot design.