Exploring the Design of Visualizations of Personal Online Data Based on Users’ Mental Models

As data becomes more and more pervasive in our daily lives, supporting people in getting visual insights into their data is an important challenge to address. However, as data visualization literacy is still low, a gap between designers’ mental model and users is not uncommon. To best pick up users where they are, we propose to include the data mental models of users into the design process. In this paper, we present our investigations in this direction by incorporating user sketches of their idea about their personal data stored at online services as a basis of our designs. We present our design study on personal data visualization interfaces resulting in a set of user sketches for three types of user groups and in three visualization interfaces. Finally, we reflect on our learnings and identify pitfalls to support other researchers in applying similar approaches.