  During the coronavirus pandemic, visualizations gained a new level of
popularity and meaning for a wider audience. People were bombarded with a wide
set of public health visualizations ranging from simple graphs to complex
interactive dashboards. In a pandemic setting, where large amounts of the world
population are socially distancing themselves, it becomes an urgent need to
refine existing user experience evaluation methods for remote settings to
understand how people make sense out of COVID-19 related visualizations. When
evaluating visualizations aimed towards the general public with vastly
different socio-demographic backgrounds and varying levels of technical
savviness and data literacy, it is important to understand user feedback beyond
aspects such as speed, task accuracy, or usability problems. As a part of this
wider evaluation perspective, micro-phenomenology has been used to evaluate
static and narrative visualizations to reveal the lived experience in a
detailed way. Building upon these studies, we conducted a user study to
understand how to employ Elicitation (aka Micro-phenomenological) interviews in
remote settings. In a case study, we investigated what experiences the
participants had with map-based interactive visualizations. Our findings reveal
positive and negative aspects of conducting Elicitation interviews remotely.
Our results can inform the process of planning and executing remote Elicitation
interviews to evaluate interactive visualizations. In addition, we share
recommendations regarding visualization techniques and interaction design about
public health data.
