Critical Design Strategy (CDS)

A structured method for evaluating visualisation designs

What is the Critical Design Strategy?

Think critically. See clearly. Design better visualisations.

The Critical Design Strategy (CDS) is a simple but powerful method for critiquing data visualisations. It guides you through a structured reflection on your work and helps you understand what you've made, why it works (or doesn't), and what to improve next.

Using CDS, you take a visualisation artefact (anything from a sketch or dashboard to an interactive tool) and step through three focused stages:

CDS is designed to be used by designers, developers, students, and researchers. It is created so people can use it to reflect on their own work. It turns critique into an active design tool, supporting learning, reflection, and iteration at any stage of a project.

CDS can be used by students to critique their own designs, by researchers to evaluate alternative visualisation approaches, and by educators to support student-led critique or structured heuristic design assessment (without the need for ethics approval when students evaluate their own work).

Start with the Highlights. Let the critique guide your next design move.

See also the Five Design Sheets (FdS)- a companion method for visualisation design exploration. FdS supports idea generation and comparison, while CDS supports structured critique and reflection.

Authors

The Critical Design Strategy (CDS) method was developed by:

Jonathan C. Roberts1, Hanan Alnjar1,2, Aron E Owen1, Panagiotis D. Ritsos1

1School of Computer Science, Bangor University, UK

2College of Science, University of Basrah,

This work draws from a series of research studies and practices in the field of data visualisation, design thinking, and creative computing. For more information, see the Further Reading section.

Citation and links

Please cite our paper if you use this tool:

Jonathan C. Roberts, Hanan Alnjar, Aron E Owen and Panagiotis D. Ritsos. "Critical Design Strategy: a Method for Heuristically Evaluating Visualisation Designs". IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 2026. 10.1109/TVCG.2025.3634783 

@article{RobertsAlnjarOwenRitsos2026,
  author       = {Jonathan C. Roberts and Hanan Alnjar and Aron E. Owen and Panagiotis D. Ritsos},
  title        = {{Critical Design Strategy: a Method for Heuristically Evaluating Visualisation Designs}},
  journal      = {{IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG)}},
  year         = {2026},
  month.       = {jan},
  pages        = {1-11},
  keywords={Data visualization;Visualization;Education;Rhetoric;Reviews;Reflection;Conferences;Usability;Systematics;Measurement;Visualisation design;Design critique;Pedagogy;Visualisation theory;Information visualisation;Teaching visualisation},       
  doi          = {10.1109/TVCG.2025.3634783},
}

PubMed information: PMID: 41259188 DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2025.3634783

Bangor University research output information, located on Pure.

Supplemental material for this paper, may be found below: