The CAPED Framework: Characterizing User Skills in Chart Authoring through the Lens of Tasks and Tools

Overview & Synopsis

In this paper, we introduce a new framework for characterizing the user skills required for chart authoring. Despite growing attention to authoring systems, we lack a conceptual framework that characterizes the diverse and multifaceted skills involved and helps identify opportunities for system design and development. Our initial investigation revealed that skill is a complex and elusive concept, and that existing theories on skills from other disciplines are too high-level to capture the importance of tasks and tools in data visualizations. To address this gap, we formulate the CAPED framework that characterizes skill as the ability to create a chart involving five dimensions pertinent to tasks and tools: input data, output chart, paradigm, abstraction, and expression. We demonstrate the framework's descriptive power by highlighting different skills involved in similar authoring situations and identifying the types of knowledge associated with chart authoring. We further present examples illustrating how the framework can be used to identify new research opportunities in supporting users with varying skills.