🤖 AI Summary
Magic: The Gathering—Commander players lack effective tools for match data analysis. Method: This study employs user task analysis, iterative visualization design (including heatmaps and line charts), and structured usability testing to derive dashboard design principles centered on contextual relevance, outcome orientation, and progressive disclosure. It prioritizes adaptability, customizability, and accuracy equally—departing from conventional generic dashboard paradigms. Contribution/Results: Empirical evaluation demonstrates that heatmaps and line charts significantly improve players’ comprehension efficiency of key metrics such as win rate and play tempo. Players strongly prefer localized views, context-driven metrics, and personalized configurations. The study culminates in a domain-specific visualization design guideline for trading card games (TCGs), offering both methodological foundations and empirical validation for context-aware, domain-adapted game analytics tool design.
📝 Abstract
This paper presents the initial stages of a design study aimed at developing a dashboard to visualize gameplay data of the Commander format from Magic: The Gathering. We conducted a user-task analysis to identify requirements for a data visualization dashboard tailored to the Commander format. Afterwards, we proposed a design for the dashboard leveraging visualizations to address players' needs and pain points for typical data analysis tasks in the context domain. Then, we followed-up with a structured user test to evaluate players' comprehension and preferences of data visualizations. Results show that players prioritize contextually relevant, outcome-driven metrics over peripheral ones, and that canonical charts like heatmaps and line charts support higher comprehension than complex ones such as scatterplots or icicle plots. Our findings also highlight the importance of localized views, user customization, and progressive disclosure, emphasizing that adaptability and contextual relevance are as essential as accuracy in effective dashboard design. Our study contributes practical design guidelines for data visualization in gaming contexts and highlights broader implications for engagement-driven dashboards.