Critical Design Strategy (CDS)

A structured method for evaluating visualisation designs

What is the Critical Design Strategy?

The Critical Design Strategy (CDS) is a structured approach to help designers reflect on and critique visualisation work. It consists of three stages — Overview, Detail, and Review — and uses 30 heuristic questions spanning six key perspectives.

The CDS helps both learners and professionals develop critical thinking, guide improvements, and support design reflection.

Authors

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

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

1School of Computer Science, Bangor University, UK

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.

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". Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 2026. arXiv.org/abs/2508.05325 

@article{RobertsAlnjarOwenRitsos2026,
  author       = {Jonathan C. Roberts, Hanan Alnjar, 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},
  note         = {Accepted for publication},
  doi          = {10.48550/arXiv.2508.05325},
  }

Supplemental material for this paper, may be found below: