ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates on many different forms of interaction for visual data analysis. When discussing interaction, four key aspects are relevant: the human, the tasks, the data, and the technology. Interaction is clearly important for visual data analysis. Interaction intents capture why users interact with visual representations. Depending on the number of runs typically necessary to achieve a goal, one can distinguish different levels of interaction: low-level interaction, intermediate-level interaction, and high-level interaction. The directness with which interaction is carried out largely determines how smoothly and efficiently the action cycle can run and how deeply the user can immerse in an interactive dialog with the data. In order to develop an understanding of directness, it is helpful to look at directness from an opposite point of view. In fact, directness is inversely proportional to the degree of separation of the human’s action and the systems’s response.
