What Diagrams Say About Technology

By examining the diagrams of technology users, we can gain insight into their perceptions. In this study, we collected diagrams from 41 participants. We found that these participants make use of both shape and position to differentiate themselves from the technology they use. Shape and position also differentiate hardware devices from software applications. Most users also draw direct connections between themselves and their applications, bypassing in their diagrams the devices that mediate this communication. Thus, devices may recede from awareness as we focus on applications and the information they make available

The state of the art in empirical user evaluation of graph visualizations

While graph drawing focuses more on the aesthetic representation of node-link diagrams, graph visualization takes into account other visual metaphors making them useful for graph exploration tasks in information visualization and visual analytics. Although there are aesthetic graph drawing criteria that describe how a graph should be presented to make it faster and more reliably explorable, many controlled and uncontrolled empirical user studies flourished over the past years. The goal of them is to uncover how well the human user performs graph-specific tasks, in many cases compared to previously designed graph visualizations. Due to the fact that many parameters in a graph dataset as well as the visual representation of them might be varied and many user studies have been conducted in this space, a state-of-the-art survey is needed to understand evaluation results and findings to inform the future design, research, and application of graph visualizations. In this paper, we classify the present literature on the topmost level into graph interpretation, graph memorability, and graph creation where the users with their tasks stand in focus of the evaluation not the computational aspects. As another outcome of this work, we identify the white spots in this field and sketch ideas for future research directions