Understanding Concept Maps: A Closer Look at How People Organise Ideas

Research into creating visualisations that organise ideas into concise concept maps often focuses on implicit mathematical and statistical theories which are built around algorithmic efficacy or visual complexity. Although there are multiple techniques which attempt to mathematically optimise this multi-dimensional problem, it is still unknown how to create concept maps that are immediately understandable to people. In this paper, we present an in-depth qualitative study observing the behaviour and discussing the strategy used by non-expert participants to create, interact, update and communicate a concept map that represents a collection of research ideas. Our results show non-expert individuals create concept maps differently to visualisation algorithms. We found that our participants prioritised narrative, landmarks, abstraction, clarity, and simplicity. Finally, we derive design recommendations from our results which we hope will inspire future algorithms that automatically create more usable and compelling concept maps better suited to the natural behaviours and needs of users.