Abstract Enhancing User Interaction with Business Intelligence Dashboards

The goal of this thesis is to improve visualization dashboards in order to help decision making and Business Intelligence (BI) analysis, and make them accessible to a larger user audience. We identify current trends and use practices of visualization dashboards in the BI domain, and following a user-cantered design approach we provide enhancements and solutions. More specifically we address the following challenges: making dashboard con-struction and use accessible to visualization novices, enhancing dashboards with advanced annotation capabilities to help BI analysts in the analysis process, and add storytelling functionality to dashboards to help the communication between analysts and decision makers. Our user-centered approach consists of gathering user requirements (through background search, in-depth interviews or prototyping sessions with BI experts), iterative prototype development, and evaluation of our prototypes with representative users. First, our work reports gathered insights regarding novice user practices on Exploration Views (EV), a system that allows novice visualization users to easily build and customize BI information dashboards, but also provides functionality needed by experts. We eval-uated EV with both expert and novice visualization users, and found differences in ho