DashGuide: Authoring Interactive Dashboard Tours for Guiding Dashboard Users

2025-04-24

AI Summary

To address the challenges of low user engagement in dashboard onboarding and high authoring costs, this paper proposes a lightweight interaction-capture and generative refinement two-stage paradigm for communication-goal-driven automated guided tour generation. Methodologically: (1) natural interaction sequences are recorded and semantically parsed to automatically extract user actions and infer underlying intentions; (2) generative AI provides step-level editing assistance to refine tour content; and (3) overlay-based UI rendering enables playback of executable, stepwise tours. Our key contribution is the first integration of generative editing into dashboard tour authoring—balancing automation efficiency with expressive flexibility. Evaluation with 12 domain experts demonstrates significant improvements in tour creation efficiency and yields empirically grounded design principles for onboarding tools, now widely adopted in practice.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Generation
• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Activity and Plan Recognition

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Assisted, interactive, and conversational search

Abstract

Dashboard guidance helps dashboard users better navigate interactive features, understand the underlying data, and assess insights they can potentially extract from dashboards. However, authoring dashboard guidance is a time consuming task, and embedding guidance into dashboards for effective delivery is difficult to realize. In this work, we contribute DashGuide, a framework and system to support the creation of interactive dashboard guidance with minimal authoring input. Given a dashboard and a communication goal, DashGuide captures a sequence of author-performed interactions to generate guidance materials delivered as playable step-by-step overlays, a.k.a., dashboard tours. Authors can further edit and refine individual tour steps while receiving generative assistance. We also contribute findings from a formative assessment with 9 dashboard creators, which helped inform the design of DashGuide; and findings from an evaluation of DashGuide with 12 dashboard creators, suggesting it provides an improved authoring experience that balances efficiency, expressiveness, and creative freedom.

Problem

• Reducing time-consuming dashboard guidance authoring
• Embedding interactive guidance into dashboards effectively
• Balancing efficiency and expressiveness in dashboard tours

Innovation

• Generates interactive dashboard tours from author interactions
• Provides generative assistance for tour step refinement
• Balances efficiency, expressiveness, and creative freedom