Interactive data analysis applications have become critical tools for making sense of our world. We present a set of recommendations to improve the quality and quantity of user activity data logged from interactive data analysis systems. Such data is invaluable for improving our understanding of the data exploration process, for implementing intelligent user interfaces, for evaluating data mining and visualization techniques, and for characterizing how the broader ecosystem of data analysis tools are used in practice.

Currently, much of the data logged by data analysis systems is intended for the purpose of debugging and system performance monitoring, not for understanding user behavior. As a result, researchers have to rely on labor-intensive techniques for extracting useful information from low-level event streams, or on collecting data through observation, interviews, experiments, and case studies.

We present recommendations — derived from personal experience as well as examples from the literature — for logging user activity in interactive data analysis tools, to ensure that better information is collected, and ultimately, to enhance human problem-solving abilities and speed the pace of discovery. We illustrate these recommendations using examples from three widely-used but distinct systems for analyzing data: Tableau, an interactive visualization product, Excel, a spreadsheet application, and Splunk, an enterprise log management and analysis platform.