Statisticians are not only one of the earliest professional adopters of data visualization, but also some of its most prolific users. Understanding how these professionals utilize visual representations in their analytic process may shed light on best practices for visual sensemaking. We present results from an interview study involving 18 professional statisticians (19.7 years average in the profession) on three aspects: (1) their use of visualization in their daily analytic work; (2) their mental models of inferential statistical processes; and (3) their design recommendations for how to best represent statistical inferences. Interview sessions consisted of discussing inferential statistics, eliciting participant sketches of suitable visual designs, and finally, a design intervention with our proposed visual designs. We analyzed interview transcripts using thematic analysis and open coding, deriving thematic codes on statistical mindset, analytic process, and analytic toolkit. The key findings for each aspect are as follows: (1) statisticians make extensive use of visualization during all phases of their work (and not just when reporting results); (2) their mental models of inferential methods tend to be mostly visually based; and (3) many statisticians abhor dichotomous thinking. The latter suggests that a multi-faceted visual display of inferential statistics that includes a visual indicator of analytically important effect sizes may help to balance the attributed epistemic power of traditional statistical testing with an awareness of the uncertainty of sensemaking.

翻译：统计学家不仅是数据可视化最早的专业采用者之一，也是其最频繁的使用者。理解这些专业人士如何在分析过程中利用视觉呈现，有助于揭示视觉意义构建的最佳实践。我们展示了一项涉及18位专业统计学家（平均从业19.7年）的访谈研究结果，涵盖三个方面：(1)他们在日常分析工作中对可视化的使用情况；(2)他们对推断统计过程的心理模型；(3)他们对如何最佳呈现统计推断的设计建议。访谈环节包括讨论推断统计、获取参与者对合适视觉设计的草图构思，以及最终采用我们提出的视觉设计进行设计干预。我们采用主题分析和开放式编码对访谈记录进行分析，归纳出关于统计思维、分析过程和分析工具包的主题编码。每个方面的关键发现如下：(1)统计学家在其工作的所有阶段（而不仅仅是报告结果时）都广泛使用可视化；(2)他们对推断方法的心理模型大多基于视觉；(3)许多统计学家厌恶二分法思维。后者表明，包含分析重要效应量视觉指标的推断统计多维度视觉展示，可能有助于在传统统计检验的认识论效力与意义构建的不确定性认知之间取得平衡。