Transitional Journey Maps: Reflections on Creating Workflow Visualizations

Our daily lives are filled with interruptions and transitions from one task to another, resulting in a fragmented workflow. These can be students who knock on our doors when we are writing a paper, or traffic updates that require us to reschedule our route to work. Consider nurses who sequentially divide their attention between patients (e.g., Potter et al., 2004). Or consider a team of police officers, who just transported a suspect to the police station after a demanding pursuit. They are about to process the corresponding paperwork at their office when they receive an urgent call, after which they start driving to the reported incident location. The historical profiles of task transitions have been associated with recuperation in task performance (Matthews and Desmond, 2002) and mental workload (Morgan and Hancock, 2011). Furthermore, there is a substantial body of research that investigates the impact of interruptions on our work and well-being (e.g., Monk et al., 2008; Bailey and Iqbal, 2008). However, as Baethge (2013) argues, these studies typically focus on isolated interruptions, thereby neglecting the accumulation of many interruptions throughout a day. As a result, she continues, an understanding of isolated interruptions cannot be generalized to a working day. In addition, Randall et al. (2000) argue that theoretical constructs based on findings in one domain may not be generalizable to
another domain. These notions of limited ecological validity and generalizability have resulted in a move outside of the familiar laboratory environment, judged by the increasing amount of field studies in living labs (e.g., Keyson et al., 2013; Vastenburg et al., 2009; Niitamo et al., 2006). Changes in research methodology cause changes in the way we present and, consequentially, interpret our data. Data visualization facilitates exploration by transforming large amounts of textual or numeric data into graphical formats (Kondaveeti et al., 2012; Segelström, 2009; Card et al., 1999)....