User Interfaces and Difference Visualizations for Alternatives

Designers often create multiple iterations to evaluate alternatives. Todays computer-based tools do not support such easy exploration of a design space, despite the fact that such support has been advocated. This dissertation is centered on this. I begin by investigating the effectiveness of various forms of difference visualizations and support for merging changes within a system targeted at diagrams with node and edge attributes. I evaluated the benefits of the introduced difference visualization techniques in two user studies. I found that the basic side-by-side juxtaposition visualization was not effective and also not well received. For comparing diagrams with matching node positions, participants preferred the side-by-side option with a difference layer. For diagrams with non-matching positions animation was beneficial, but the combination with a difference layer was preferred. Thus, the difference layer technique was useful and a good complement to animation. I continue by investigating if explicit support for design alternatives better supports exploration and creativity in a generative design system. To investigate the new techniques to better support exploration, I built a new system that supports parallel exploration of alternative designs and generation of new structural combinations. I investigate the usefulness of my prototype in two user studies and interviews. The results and feedback suggest and confirm that supporting design alternatives explicitly enables designers to work more creatively. Generative models are often represented as DAGs (directed acyclic graphs) in a dataflow programming environment. Existing approaches to compare such DAGs do not generalize to multiple alternatives. Informed by and building on the first part of my dissertation, I introduce a novel user interface that enables visual differencing and editing alternative graphsspecifically more than two alternatives simultaneously, something that has not been presented before. I also explore multi-monitor support to demonstrate that the difference visualization technique scales well to up to 18 alternatives. The novel jamming space feature makes organizing alternatives on a 23 monitor system easier. To investigate the usability of the new difference visualization method I conducted an exploratory interview with three expert designers. The received comments confirmed that it meets their design goals

Shk-9: A new tool in approach of glycoprotein annotation

Changes in glycosylation are involved in different human diseases, including cancer. The recognition of glycan-based biomarkers became one of the most strategic research areas. Scientists all over the world performed comprehensive screens and found a number of substances that can be matched to human cancer. Unfortunately, this data is difficult to access and utilize. Besides the advantage of a wide variety of available hardware, the diversity may software-wise complicate the data annotation. The growing databases provide the opportunity for more dependable templates, but are also a challenge for the execution of automatic protocols. To refine utilizing of these findings and contribute to scientific meta-analyses, we developed the ShK-9. Program outputs include lines of text containing a string found in the supplied list. These imprints are written into text files that can be imported into spreadsheet standard office programs for further analyses. The aim of this article is to introduce a new open source tool for working with data sets, called ShK-9. Keywords: Glycoprotein, Database, Linear searc

The design and realization of CoViD: a system for collaborative virtual 3D design

Many important decisions in the design process are made during fairly early on, after designers have presented initial concepts. In many domains, these concepts are already realized as 3D digital models. Then, in a meeting, the stakeholders for the project get together and evaluate these potential solutions. Frequently, the participants in this meeting want to interactively modify the proposed 3D designs to explore the design space better. Today's systems and tools do not support this, as computer systems typically support only a single user and computer-aided design tools require significant training. This paper presents the design of a new system to facilitate a collaborative 3D design process. First, we discuss a set of guidelines which have been introduced by others and that are relevant to collaborative 3D design systems. Then, we introduce the new system, which consists of two main parts. The first part is an easy-to-use conceptual 3D design tool that can be used productively even by naive users. The tool provides novel interaction techniques that support important properties of conceptual design. The user interface is nonobtrusive, easy-to-learn, and supports rapid creation and modification of 3D models. The second part is a novel infrastructure for collaborative work, which offers an interactive table and several large interactive displays in a semiimmersive setup. It is designed to support multiple users working together. This infrastructure also includes novel pointing devices that work both as a stylus and a remote pointing device. The combination of the (modified) design tool with the collaborative infrastructure forms a new platform for collaborative virtual 3D design. Then, we present an evaluation of the system against the guidelines for collaborative 3D design. Finally, we present results of a preliminary user study, which asked naive users to collaborate in a 3D design task on the new system

MACE: A New Interface for Comparing and Editing of Multiple Alternative Documents for Generative Design

We present a new interface for interactive comparisons of more than two alternative documents in the context of a generative design system that uses generative data-flow networks defined via directed acyclic graphs. To better show differences between such networks, we emphasize added, deleted, (un)changed nodes and edges. We emphasize differences in the output as well as parameters using highlighting and enable post-hoc merging of the state of a parameter across a selected set of alternatives. To minimize visual clutter, we introduce new difference visualizations for selected nodes and alternatives using additive and subtractive encodings, which improve readability and keep visual clutter low. We analyzed similarities in networks from a set of alternative designs produced by architecture students and found that the number of similarities outweighs the differences, which motivates use of subtractive encoding. We ran a user study to evaluate the two main proposed difference visualization encodings and found that they are equally effective

Modelling error rates in temporal pointing

| openaire: EC/H2020/637991/EU//COMPUTEDPeer reviewe