We are happy to report that Julien De Meyer successfully presented his Master of Business Administration (MBA) thesis entitled “Customization of Dashboard User Interfaces by the Decision Maker” at Louvain School of Management (LSM), Université catholique de Louvain, under the supervision of Jean Vanderdonckt, in collaboration with AEGIS in the context of the SYMBIOTIK project.
Michalis Vakalellis, Business and Innovation Manager at AEGIS IT RESEARCH and Principal Investigator in SYMBTIOTIK, was a member of the jury.
A growing number of companies are using dashboards to support their decision making. However, as each person has different needs, it’s valuable to adapt these dashboards to suit each decision-maker. This is why this master thesis specifies, defines, and explores the capabilities of a decision maker to customize the graphical user interface of a dashboard to optimize the decision process.
For this purpose, various components that make customization possible are investigated with a particular focus on telephone call visualization. Then, four catalogs documenting potential adaptations of the dashboard are created to drive the customization process. These catalogs are structured along several dimensions such as adaptation type, element subject to adaptation, ergonomic criteria, and context-dependency.
While these catalogs are independent of any system and dashboard, we apply them on the use case “Murder investigation” dashboard (see screenshot) from the software company AEGIS, where telephone calls visualization is central. We were then able to test participants’ preferences among adaptations of two of the catalogs in an experiment.
In one these studies, the most preferred visualizations have been identified and classified. For example, the following figure shows the most preferred representations computed according to the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model. Only options depicted in green will be later considered in adapting AEGIS user interfaces.
