Wesley Willett

Scented Widgets: Improving Navigation Cues with Embedded Visualizations

This paper presents scented widgets, graphical user interface controls enhanced with embedded visualizations that facilitate navigation in information spaces. We describe design guidelines for adding visual cues to common user interface widgets such as radio buttons, sliders, and combo boxes and contribute a general software framework for applying scented widgets within applications with minimal modifications to existing source code. We provide a number of example applications and describe a controlled experiment which finds that users exploring unfamiliar data make up to twice as many unique discoveries using widgets imbued with social navigation data. However, these differences equalize as familiarity with the data increases.

Common sense community: scaffolding mobile sensing and analysis for novice users

As sensing technologies become increasingly distributed and democratized, citizens and novice users are becoming responsible for the kinds of data collection and analysis that have traditionally been the purview of professional scientists and analysts. Leveraging this citizen engagement effectively, however, requires not only tools for sensing and data collection but also mechanisms for understanding and utilizing input from both novice and expert stakeholders. When successful, this process can result in actionable findings that leverage and engage community members and build on their experiences and observations. We explored this process of knowledge production through several dozen interviews with novice community members, scientists, and regulators as part of the design of a mobile air quality monitoring system. From these interviews, we derived design principles and a framework for describing data collection and knowledge generation in citizen science settings, culminating in the user-centered design of a system for community analysis of air quality data. Unlike prior systems, ours breaks analysis tasks into discrete mini-applications designed to facilitate and scaffold novice contributions. An evaluation we conducted with community members in an area with air quality concerns indicates that these mini-applications help participants identify relevant phenomena and generate local knowledge contributions.

Embedded Data Representations

We introduce embedded data representations, the use of visual and physical representations of data that are deeply integrated with the physical spaces, objects, and entities to which the data refers. Technologies like lightweight wireless displays, mixed reality hardware, and autonomous vehicles are making it increasingly easier to display data in-context. While researchers and artists have already begun to create embedded data representations, the benefits, trade-offs, and even the language necessary to describe and compare these approaches remain unexplored. In this paper, we formalize the notion of physical data referents - the real-world entities and spaces to which data corresponds - and examine the relationship between referents and the visual and physical representations of their data. We differentiate situated representations, which display data in proximity to data referents, and embedded representations, which display data so that it spatially coincides with data referents. Drawing on examples from visualization, ubiquitous computing, and art, we explore the role of spatial indirection, scale, and interaction for embedded representations. We also examine the tradeoffs between non-situated, situated, and embedded data displays, including both visualizations and physicalizations. Based on our observations, we identify a variety of design challenges for embedded data representation, and suggest opportunities for future research and applications.

Exploring the Placement and Design of Word-Scale Visualizations.

We present an exploration and a design space that characterize the usage and placement of word-scale visualizations within text documents. Word-scale visualizations are a more general version of sparklines-small, word-sized data graphics that allow meta-information to be visually presented in-line with document text. In accordance with Edward Tuftes definition, sparklines are traditionally placed directly before or after words in the text. We describe alternative placements that permit a wider range of word-scale graphics and more flexible integration with text layouts. These alternative placements include positioning visualizations between lines, within additional vertical and horizontal space in the document, and as interactive overlays on top of the text. Each strategy changes the dimensions of the space available to display the visualizations, as well as the degree to which the text must be adjusted or reflowed to accommodate them. We provide an illustrated design space of placement options for word-scale visualizations and identify six important variables that control the placement of the graphics and the level of disruption of the source text. We also contribute a quantitative analysis that highlights the effect of different placements on readability and text disruption. Finally, we use this analysis to propose guidelines to support the design and placement of word-scale visualizations.

Hybrid-Image Visualization for Large Viewing Environments

We present a first investigation into hybrid-image visualization for data analysis in large-scale viewing environments. Hybrid-image visualizations blend two different visual representations into a single static view, such that each representation can be perceived at a different viewing distance. Our work is motivated by data analysis scenarios that incorporate one or more displays with sufficiently large size and resolution to be comfortably viewed by different people from various distances. Hybrid-image visualizations can be used, in particular, to enhance overview tasks from a distance and detail-in-context tasks when standing close to the display. By using a perception-based blending approach, hybrid-image visualizations make two full-screen visualizations accessible without tracking viewers in front of a display. We contribute a design space, discuss the perceptual rationale for our work, provide examples, and introduce a set of techniques and tools to aid the design of hybrid-image visualizations.

Lightweight Relief Shearing for Enhanced Terrain Perception on Interactive Maps

We explore interactive relief shearing, a set of non-intrusive, direct manipulation interactions that expose depth and shape information in terrain maps using ephemeral animations. Reading and interpreting topography and relief on terrain maps is an important aspect of map use, but extracting depth information from 2D maps is notoriously difficult. Modern mapping software attempts to alleviate this limitation by presenting digital terrain using 3D views. However, 3D views introduce occlusion, complicate distance estimations, and typically require more complex interactions. In contrast, our approach reveals depth information via shearing animations on 2D maps, and can be paired with existing interactions such as pan and zoom. We examine explicit, integrated, and hybrid interactions for triggering relief shearing and present a version that uses device tilt to control depth effects. Our evaluation shows that these interactive techniques improve depth perception when compared to standard 2D and perspective views.

Exploring the Effect of Word-Scale Visualizations on Reading Behavior

We studied how the integration of small visualizations (word-scale visualizations) into a sentence affects reading speed and memorization during a brief reading task. In particular, we were interested in how different placement types with their inherent text appearance and layout changes affect readers. We designed a quantitative study in which we gave sentences with or without visualizations for participants to read. Then, we invited them to answer questions on the sentences. We found that the information encoded in the visualizations is more prominent and easily remembered than information in the written text, but that different placement options had little to no effect on reading performance, even if participants had different preferences.

An Exploratory Study of Word-Scale Graphics in Data-Rich Text Documents

We contribute an investigation of the design and function of word-scale graphics and visualizations embedded in text documents. Word-scale graphics include both data-driven representations such as word-scale visualizations and sparklines, and non-data-driven visual marks. Their design, function, and use has so far received little research attention. We present the results of an open ended exploratory study with nine graphic designers. The study resulted in a rich collection of different types of graphics, data provenance, and relationships between text, graphics, and data. Based on this corpus, we present a systematic overview of word-scale graphic designs, and examine how designers used them. We also discuss the designers’ goals in creating their graphics, and characterize how they used word-scale graphics to visualize data, add emphasis, and create alternative narratives. Building on these examples, we discuss implications for the design of authoring tools for word-scale graphics and visualizations, and explore how new authoring environments could make it easier for designers to integrate them into documents.

Supporting Historical Research Through User-Centered Visual Analytics

In this paper we describe the development and evaluation of a visual analytics tool to support historical research. Historians continuously gather data related to their scholarly research from archival visits and background search. Organising and making sense of all this data can be challenging as many historians continue to rely on analog or basic digital tools. We built an integrated note-taking environment for historians which unifies a set of func-tionalities we identified as important for historical research including editing, tagging, searching, sharing and visualization. Our approach was to involve users from the initial stage of brainstorming and requirement analysis through to design, implementation and evaluation. We report on the process and results of our work, and conclude by reflecting on our own experience in conducting user-centered visual analytics design for digital humanities.

Eliciting Multi-touch Selection Gestures for Interactive Data Graphics

We report the results of a study in which we elicited selection gestures for multi-touch data graphics. The selection of data items is a common and extremely important form of interaction with data graphics, and serves as the basis for many other data interaction techniques. However, interactive charting tools for multi-touch displays typically only provide dedicated multi-touch gestures for single-point selection or zooming. Our study used gesture elicitation to explore a wider range of possible selection interactions for multi-touch data graphics. The results show a strong preference for simple, one-handed selection gestures. They also show that users tend to interact with chart axes and make figurative selection gestures outside the chart, rather than interact with the visual marks themselves. Finally, we found strong consensus around several unique selection gestures related to visual chart features.