Structural Components of Students’ Data- Focused Information Visualization

Information Visualization (InfoVis), as an analytics and visualization tool, had been argued to be befitting in attending to the experience of information overload, and subsequent decision making constraint of higher education institutions’ (HEIs) decision makers. This experience is said to be as a result of increase in volume of students’ data and the limitations of the available data management tools. However, due to the diversity of domains in which application of InfoVis are demanded, designing domain-specific structural components of the intending InfoVis is compulsory, so as to address its peculiar domain problem. Adapting the generic Design Research method, we employed critical review of documentations of selected InfoVis tools and mapped the findings with the outcome of our previous investigation of the HEIs’ decision makers’ explicit knowledge preferences. This work therefore highlights the structural components of the HEIs’ students’ data-focused InfoVis.