The Effect of Nudging Techniques on the Customisation and Usability of Visual Analytics Dashboards

Visual analytics dashboards have become essential tools for decisionmaking.However, information overload and mismatches between designers' expected graph literacy and users' actual graph literacy can limit their effectiveness.Customisation has been proposed to mitigate these challenges and accommodate diverse user needs.Yet, customising dashboards is often time-consuming; users may not be aware of existing customisation features, or they may not have sufficient technical skills to use them.In this paper, we conduct an experiment (N=50) to examine if we can use nudging techniques to promote short-term surface customisations while not sacrificing the usability of interactive visual analytics dashboards.We found that while nudges do not necessarily increase the use of customisation functionalities, they benefit usability.Specifically, the Social Comparisons nudge supports decision-making, while the Just-in-Time Prompts nudge reduces task completion time.Our findings suggest that nudges should be tailored to graph literacy as users with moderate graph literacy can benefit the most from nudges.