Expert-interviews led analysis of EEVi — A model for effective visualization in cyber-security
Aneesha Sethi, Gary Brian Wills · 2017
The area of visualization in cyber-security is advancing at a fast pace. However, there is a lack of standardized guidelines for designing and evaluating the resulting visualizations. Furthermore, limited end-user involvement in the design process leads to visualizations that are generic and often ineffective for cyber-security analysts. Thus, the adoption of the resultant cyber-security visualizations is low and this highlights a major research gap. This paper presents expert-interview based validation of EEVi - a model developed to aid in the design and evaluation process of cyber-security visualizations, with a view to make them more effective for cyber-security analysts. A visualization is considered effective if the characteristics of the visualization are essential for an analyst to competently perform a certain task. Thirteen experts were interviewed (six visualization designers and seven cyber-security analysts) and their feedback guided revisions to the model. The responses were subsequently transposed from qualitative data to quantitive data in order to perform statistical analyses on the overall data. This demonstrated that the perspectives of visualization designers and cyber-security analysts generally agreed in their views of effective characteristics for cyber-security visualization, however there was no statistically significant correlation in their responses.