Understanding human-data interaction: Literature review and recommendations for design

The trend of collecting information about human activities to inform and influence actions and decisions poses a series of challenges to analyze this data deluge. The lack of ability to understand and interact with this amount of data prevents people and organizations from taking the best of this information. To investigate how people interact with data, a new area of study called “Human-Data Interaction” (HDI) is emerging. In this article, we conduct a thorough literature review to create the big picture about the subject. We carry out a variety of analyses and visual examinations to understand the characteristics of existing publications, detecting the most frequently addressed research topics and consolidating the research challenges. Based on the needs of HDI we found in the analyzed publications, we organize a set of recommendations and evaluate online systems that demand intensive human-data interaction. The obtained results indicate there are still many open questions for this interesting area, which is maturing with an increase number of publications in the last years, and that systems with large amount of data openly available poorly meet the proposed recommendations.