Fostering Adequate Application of Business Information Visualization with User Assistance Systems and Serious Games

Research on human-computer interaction (HCI) has a long tradition in the domain of Information Systems (IS). One example of this interaction is business reporting, where so-called business intelligence (BI) software is used by report designers to create business reports for decision-makers. Here, the main task is to create transparency and to provide relevant information as a basis for decision making by drawing attention to critical areas and revealing needs for action. Studies show that in order to convey business information, graphical representations are increasingly used in business reporting. These graphical representations may be termed Business Information Visualization (BIV), which is the use of computer-supported interactive graphical representations of business data to amplify cognition for improved decision making. Since the human visual system is by far the richest, most immediate, highest bandwidth pipeline into the human mind, this dissertation focuses on the visualization of graphical elements and their relationships in business reports to show relevant information, which is a key task within BIV. However, despite several guidelines for appropriate BIV already exist, studies show that reports often do not comply with these guidelines. This dissertation addresses the root causes of this problem, which are twofold. First, users’ lack of compliance with BIV guidelines due to unsatisfactory software support. Second, limited knowledge about BIV guidelines and their application due to insufficient training possibilities as well as insufficient BIV education in school or higher education when studying business administration. Since this dissertation draws on newly developed prototypical software artifacts to contribute to gaining insight on the outlined challenges, the overall methodological approach may be described as Design Science Research (DSR)