A research agenda on visualizations in information systems engineering

Effectively using visualizations in socio-technical artifacts like information systems and software yields a number of challenges, such as ensuring that they allow for all necessary information to be captured, that visualizations can be efficiently and correctly read, and perhaps most important: that communication is fostered, leading rather to a shared understanding instead of misunderstandings and communication breakdowns. While over the last years many strides have been made to propose visualizations for specific purposes (such as modeling language notations, software interfaces, visual methods, and games), there has been less attention for frameworks and guidelines meant to support the people making such visualizations. When taking a closer look at the deficiencies in research on visualizations in information systems today, it turns out that especially a deeper understanding of the mental processes behind comprehending visualizations and the way humans are cognitively affected by visualizations, is required in order to gain advanced theoretic underpinnings for the creation and use of visualizations in information systems. In this paper we build towards a research agenda on visualization in information systems engineering by identifying a number of relevant requirements for research to address, of fundamental, methodical and tool nature.