The paper Designing Attentive Information Dashboards by Peyman Toreini, Moritz Langner, Alexander Maedche, Stefan Morana, and Tobias Vogel has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS). JAIS is the flagship journal of the Association for Information Systems and publishes highest quality research in the field of information systems. JAIS promotes innovative, interesting, and rigorously developed conceptual and empirical contributions and encourages theory based multi- or inter-disciplinary research.

Designing Attentive Information Dashboards

Peyman Toreini, Moritz Langner, Alexander Maedche, Stefan Morana, and Tobias Vogel

Abstract:

Information dashboards are a critical capability in contemporary business intelligence & analytics systems. Despite coming with strong potential to support better decision making, the huge amount of information provided challenges their users when they perform data exploration tasks. Accordingly, dashboard users face difficulties in managing their limited attentional resources when processing the presented information on dashboards. Also, recent studies show that the amount of concentrated time humans can spend on a task is reduced massively and there is a need for designing user interfaces that support their users’ attention management. Therefore, in this design science research project, we propose attentive information dashboards that provide individualized visual attention feedback (VAF) as an innovative artifact to solve this problem. We articulate theoretically grounded design principles and instantiate a software artifact leveraging users’ eye movement gaze data in real-time to provide individualized VAF. The instantiated artifact was evaluated in a controlled lab experiment with 92 participants. The results from analyzing users' eye movement after receiving individualized VAF reveal that our proposed design has a positive effect on users’ attentional resource allocation, attention shift rate, and attentional resource management. We contribute a system architecture for attentive information dashboards that support data exploration and two theoretically grounded design principles that provide prescriptive knowledge on how to provide individualized VAF. Further, practitioners can leverage the prescriptive knowledge derived from our research and design innovative systems that support users’ information processing by managing their limited attentional resources.

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