"The Diagram is like Guardrails": Structuring GenAI-assisted Hypotheses Exploration with an Interactive Shared Representation

Figure 1: Our system supports nonlinear AI-assisted hypothesis exploration that balances breadth and depth of exploration.Using the node-link diagram shared representation and integrated information hint panels that display preliminary results and related work, a participant in our user study deeply explored a branch of hypotheses around gender income gaps, including a nuanced hypothesis about field-specific gender disparities in income (A); but also simultaneously kept track of the overall hypothesis space, and backtracked to explore other hypothesis branches around variations in income by marital status (B), such as post-divorce impacts on income.A more detailed version Figure 10 can be found in Appendix B.