Visual query systems (VQSs) empower users to interactively search for line charts with desired visual patterns, typically specified using intuitive sketch-based interfaces. Despite decades of past work on VQSs, these efforts have not translated to adoption in practice, possibly because VQSs are largely evaluated in unrealistic lab-based settings. To remedy this gap in adoption, we collaborated with experts from three diverse domains-astronomy, genetics, and material science-via a year-long user-centered design process to develop a VQS that supports their workflow and analytical needs, and evaluate how VQSs can be used in practice. Our study results reveal that ad-hoc sketch-only querying is not as commonly used as prior work suggests, since analysts are often unable to precisely express their patterns of interest. In addition, we characterize three essential sensemaking processes supported by our enhanced VQS. We discover that participants employ all three processes, but in different proportions, depending on the analytical needs in each domain. Our findings suggest that all three sensemaking processes must be integrated in order to make future VQSs useful for a wide range of analytical inquiries.

中文翻译：

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您不能总是勾勒出自己想要的东西：了解可视查询系统中的感官。

视觉查询系统（VQS）使用户可以交互地搜索具有所需视觉模式的折线图，这些视觉模式通常使用直观的基于草图的界面来指定。尽管过去在VQS方面进行了数十年的工作，但这些努力并未转化为在实践中的采用，这可能是因为VQS在很大程度上是在不切实际的基于实验室的环境中进行评估的。为了弥补在采用方面的差距，我们与为时一年的以用户为中心的设计过程，与来自天文学，遗传学和材料科学这三个不同领域的专家合作，开发了可支持其工作流程和分析需求的VQS，并评估了VQS如何可以在实践中使用。我们的研究结果表明，由于分析人员通常无法精确表达其兴趣模式，因此仅草图临时查询的使用并不像以前的工作所建议的那样普遍。此外，我们描述了增强的VQS支持的三个必不可少的感知过程。我们发现，参与者根据每个领域的分析需求采用了所有三个过程，但是比例不同。我们的研究结果表明，必须将所有三个有意义的过程集成在一起，以使将来的VQS对广泛的分析查询有用。