Investigating the use of a dynamic physical bar chart for data exploration and presentation

Physical data representations, or data physicalizations, are a promising new medium to represent and communicate data. Previous work mostly studied passive physicalizations which require humans to perform all interactions manually. Dynamic shape-changing displays address this limitation and facilitate data exploration tasks such as sorting, navigating in data sets which exceed the fixed size of a given physical display, or preparing “views” to communicate insights about data. However, it is currently unclear how people approach and interact with such data representations. We ran an exploratory study to investigate how nonexperts made use of a dynamic physical bar chart for an open-ended data exploration and presentation task. We asked 16 participants to explore a data set on European values and to prepare a short presentation of their insights using a physical display. We analyze: (1) users’ body movements to understand how they approach and react to the physicalization, (2) their hand-gestures to understand how they interact with physical data, (3) system interactions to understand which subsets of the data they explored and which features they used in the process, and (4) strategies used to explore the data and present observations. We discuss the implications of our findings for the use of dynamic data physicalizations and avenues for future wor

Non-universal usability?: A survey of how usability is understood by Chinese and Danish users

ABSTRACT Most research assumes that usability is understood similarly by users in different cultures, implying that the notion of usability, its aspects, and their interrelations are constant across cultures. The present study shows that this is not the case for a sample of 412 users from China and Denmark, who differ in how they understand and prioritize different aspects of usability. Chinese users appear to be more concerned with visual appearance, satisfaction, and fun than Danish users; Danish users prioritize effectiveness, efficiency, and lack of frustration higher than Chinese users. The results suggest that culture influences perceptions of usability. We discuss implications for usability research and for usability practice

Exploring interactions with physically dynamic bar charts

Visualizations such as bar charts help users reason about data, but are mostly screen-based, rarely physical, and almost never physical and dynamic. This paper investigates the role of physically dynamic bar charts and evaluates new interactions for exploring and working with datasets rendered in dynamic physical form. To facilitate our exploration we constructed a 10x10 interactive bar chart and designed interactions that supported fundamental visualisation tasks, specifically; annotation, filtering, organization, and navigation. The interactions were evaluated in a user study with 17 participants. Our findings identify the preferred methods of working with the data for each task i.e. directly tapping rows to hide bars, highlight the strengths and limitations of working with physical data, and discuss the challenges of integrating the proposed interactions together into a larger data exploration system. In general, physical interactions were intuitive, informative, and enjoyable, paving the way for new explorations in physical data visualizations

Some whys and hows of experiments in human-computer interaction

Presents guidelines on how to design, run, and report experiments in Human-Computer Interaction. It identifies heuristics of doing good experiments; how to craft challenging comparisons; how to design experiments so as to rule out alternative explanations; how to provide evidence for conclusions; and how to narrate findings

Input techniques that dynamically change their cursor activation area: A comparison of bubble and cell cursors

Abstract Efficient pointing is crucial to graphical user interfaces, and input techniques that dynamically change their activation area may yield improvements over point cursors by making objects selectable at a distance. Input techniques that dynamically change their activation area include the bubble cursor, whose activation area always contains the closest object, and two variants of cell cursors, whose activation areas contain a set of objects in the vicinity of the cursor. We report two experiments that compare these techniques to a point cursor; in one experiment participants use a touchpad for operating the input techniques, in the other a mouse. In both experiments, the bubble cursor is fastest and participants make fewer errors with it. Participants also unanimously prefer this technique. For small targets, the cell cursors are generally more accurate than the point cursor; in the second experiment the box cursor is also faster. The cell cursors succeed in letting participants select objects while the cursor is far away from the target, but are relatively slow in the final phase of target acquisition. We discuss limitations and possible enhancements of input techniques with activation areas that contain multiple objects.

Reading of Electronic Documents: The Usability of Linear, Fisheye, and Overview+Detail Interfaces

Reading of electronic documents is becoming increasingly important as more information is disseminated electronically. We present an experiment that compares the usability of a linear, a fisheye, and an overview+detail interface for electronic documents. Using these interfaces, 20 subjects wrote essays and answered questions about scientific documents. Essays written using the overview+detail interface received higher grades, while subjects using the fisheye interface read documents faster. However, subjects used more time to answer questions with the overview+detail interface. All but one subject preferred the overview+detail interface. The most common interface in practical use, the linear interface, is found to be inferior to the fisheye and overview+detail interfaces regarding most aspects of usability. We recommend using overview+detail interfaces for electronic documents, while fisheye interfaces mainly should be considered for timecritical tasks