Beyond the Spinner: What Should Analytical Agents Surface While They Work?

Vela

📅 April 1, 2027✍️ Md. Rahat-Uz-Zaman, Srishti Palani, Dennis Bromley, Vidya Setlur📚 CHI 2027 (submitted)🎯 article

@inproceedings{rahatuzzaman2027vela,
  author    = {Md Rahat-uz-Zaman and Srishti Palani and Dennis Bromley and Vidya Setlur},
  title     = {Beyond the Spinner: What Should Analytical Agents Surface While They Work?},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2027 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2027},
  note      = {(Submitted)}
}

Conversational and agent-driven analytics increasingly carry out long-running, multi-step workflows, yet users are often left with either opaque progress indicators or verbose execution traces. A formative study with data and analytics practitioners characterized what users want to see while an agent works, when they prefer to monitor versus intervene, and how these needs vary across tasks and contexts, yielding a framework for intermediate analytical surfacing. We present Vela, a system for adaptive intermediate surfacing that operationalizes this framework through a lightweight Observer that incrementally constructs grounded, task-specific analytical state and adapts disclosure based on task and interaction behavior. A summative study used Vela as a research probe to examine how people monitor, verify, and steer long-running analyses in practice. Together, these studies contribute an empirical characterization of intermediate visibility needs, design guidelines and a task-aware surfacing framework, and an observer-based architecture for adaptively constructing and disclosing intermediate analytical state.