Al-Maneea, Hayder Mahdi Abdullah

Roberts, Jonathan C.

English

Multiple views is a popular strategy in information visualisation,but for many years researchers have asked questions such as “howmany views and what layout strategies do people use?” Answer-ing these questions would help developers create suitable multiple-view systems, but to date there has been little research into thesequestions. In this short paper, we present initial results of a largerongoing study looking at how multiple-views are used. For thisstudy, we built a database of images containing screenshots of vi-sualisation tools from articles presented at IEEE VIS from 2012 to2017. We select suitable images across TVCG journal, conference,posters and workshop papers. We closely evaluate the layout of 340images of multiple-view systems and consider the layout topologyof each image. Our results show that in the past six years, develop-ers use on average (just over) four views

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   PRIFYSGOL BANGOR / BANGOR UNIVERSITY  Study of Multiple View Layout Strategies in VisualisationRoberts, Jonathan C.; Al-Maneea, Hayder Mahdi AbdullahPublished: 01/10/2018Peer reviewed versionCyswllt i'r cyhoeddiad / Link to publicationDyfyniad o'r fersiwn a gyhoeddwyd / Citation for published version (APA):Roberts, J. C., & Al-Maneea, H. M. A. (2018). Study of Multiple View Layout Strategies inVisualisation. Poster session presented at IEEE Conference on Visualization, Berlin, Germany.Hawliau Cyffredinol / General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/orother copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legalrequirements associated with these rights.            • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of privatestudy or research.            • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain            • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ?Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access tothe work immediately and investigate your claim. 01. Jun. 2021Study of Multiple View Layout Strategies in VisualisationHayder M. Al-maneea∗Bangor University, UK and Basrah University, IraqJonathan C. Roberts†Bangor University, UKABSTRACTMultiple views is a popular strategy in information visualisation,but for many years researchers have asked questions such as “howmany views and what layout strategies do people use?” Answer-ing these questions would help developers create suitable multiple-view systems, but to date there has been little research into thesequestions. In this short paper, we present initial results of a largerongoing study looking at how multiple-views are used. For thisstudy, we built a database of images containing screenshots of vi-sualisation tools from articles presented at IEEE VIS from 2012 to2017. We select suitable images across TVCG journal, conference,posters and workshop papers. We closely evaluate the layout of 340images of multiple-view systems and consider the layout topologyof each image. Our results show that in the past six years, develop-ers use on average (just over) four views.Keywords: Visualisation, Multiple Views, Layout strategies.1 INTRODUCTIONMultiple views has been used in information visualisation for manyyears. There are different design strategies from view juxtaposi-tion, superposition of many views, or cleverly merging the viewinformation [2], such as by overloading or nesting [3]. In this paperwe focus on view juxtaposition, where developers display informa-tion in many side-by-side views. One of the reasons developers usesuch duplication is to help users understand the displayed informa-tion. Perhaps a user understands better one style of visualisation incomparison to another, or perhaps one type of visualisation formmakes it easier to perform a task, and another form makes it easierto perform a different task. So by using many different view typesthe user can gain a better understanding of the underlying data. An-other reason to use multiple views is to compare data shown in sim-ilar views presented side-by-side. Such tools are described as smallmultiple views or parallel view systems. Additionally, the manipu-lation of data within these juxtaposed views is often linked together.In fact, Coordinated Multiple View systems [6] provide the back-bone of most modern visualisation systems.This research is part of an ongoing project investigating uses andlayout strategies of multiple views. Our goal is to help and guidedevelopers create well-designed multiview systems; to provide aframework and reference source that designers and developers ofnew systems will be able to use. This short paper fits within thislong term strategy. The purpose of this paper is to report on a studyinvestigating the quantity of views used in multiple view systems,based on tools presented at visualisation conferences. Countingview layouts helps us get one step closer to our goal.2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORKThere are many different ways to layout juxtaposed views, and it isdifficult for a designer to know which layout strategy is useful. In-deed, it is unclear which are the most popular layout configurations.∗e-mail: h.m.al-maneea@bangor.ac.uk†e-mail: j.c.roberts@bangor.ac.ukWe have been exploring layout strategies, and particularly for thispaper we have been investigating the relationship between the num-ber of views and the configuration of the layout of juxtaposed views.As researchers ourselves, we have developed and designed severalCoordinated and Multiple View systems, and have had many dis-cussions with other researchers about the use and layout strategiesof multiple-views. But to date there is little quantitative researchlooking at view layout. Certainly there are several papers that pro-vide guidelines for designers of multiple view systems. These in-clude Baldonado et al. [8] who suggest that multiple views shouldbe used parsimoniously, while on the other hand, Roberts [5] en-courages designers to use many views. In other work, Roberts [6]provides a comprehensive review of coordinated multiple viewstechniques. In fact, the series of conferences on “Coordinated andMultiple View” that ran 2003 to 2007, published by IEEE provide aset of useful reference papers on various CMV techniques. Gleicheret al. [1, 2] provides a deep discussion into juxtaposition, superpo-sition and explicit designs for multiple view systems, and Qu andHullman [4] present strategies to keep multiple views consistent.3 STUDY METHODOLOGYTo evaluate the multiple view layouts we went through three steps:(1) we decided which images we would use, and copied them fromthe papers into a separate database. (2) We considered each visuali-sation, made a sketch of the topology, and classified them accordingto their layout by physically organising the pieces of paper on a ta-ble. (3) We counted the different layouts and gathered quantitativedata of the types and layouts.3.1 Preparation and image selectionFor our study, we chose to evaluate the tools presented at the re-cent six years of the IEEE VIS conference. There are over 2912PDF files on the six years of USB memory sticks from the IEEEVIS conferences. Estimating that each file probably has more thanone image, and that not every image presents a screen capture of avisualisation tool, we needed a strategy to select (and reduce) thequantity of images to evaluate. After deliberation and experimenta-tion, our strategy was fourfold: (1) We removed all supplementarymaterials. (2) We removed papers that did not have visualisations,or only had one view, or only had illustrations and schematic dia-grams. (3) We removed files that only had images that were clearlyput-together or had been edited (by an image processing tool), welooked for telltale signs, such as miss-aligned sub-images or severalimage resolutions in different parts of the figure. We also removedpapers that had displayed their images from several sub-figures. (4)We removed papers that only had extremely small sized figures atlow image resolution, which would have been unclear to classify.This process resulted in a bank of 340 images. We labelled eachimage with a unique abbreviation (that we also use in LaTex to citethe paper). This meant that we could easily reference the image,and locate the associated publication.3.2 Considering the topology, and sketching layoutsFor this short paper we are only concerned with the topologicallayout of the designs. In other words we evaluated the structure ofthe layout, ignoring their relative sizes. For example, we considera side-by-side two-view display with one small view and the otherFigure 1: For every image we sketched a representative picture ofthe layout topology, resulting in 17 sheets of paper of sketches.Figure 2: The 17 sheets were cut into individual tiles and positionedon a table. This shows a visual quantitative summary of view layouts.one large, to be structurally the same as another visualisation thathas equal 50/50 split of the size of the each view.We displayed each image in turn on a large screen, and carefullymake judgement on the topology of each of the 340 images. Wemake several judgements and notes on the images. We had twoinvestigators evaluate the images. From early discussions about thetopology we realised that some images were easy to judge, whileothers were not clear. Therefore we started with a training phase.The two investigators classified individually 20 (randomly chosen)images. Out of this set, five were unclear. But after discussing thesecases, we easily agreed the topology.Subsequently we proceeded as follows: Every image was dis-played on the screen and judged. If a quick judgement could bemade then one simple (indicative) sketch was made on a piece ofpaper. However, if the topology was unclear, then every possibletopology was sketched. Every sketch was also labelled with the pa-per reference. From 340 images, we generated over 17 sheets of pa-per (with on average over 20 sketches per page). We discussed 124cases and agreed their topological structure, and randomly checkedanother 10 to make sure we agreed with a selection of the othercases. A photograph of the sheets is shown in Figure 1. The agreedsketched images were then cut up into individual tiles, keeping onlythe agreed topologies.We used a tangible method, where we placed the tiles on a table,discussed their layout strategy, and physically moved the pieces ofpaper to place similar layouts together. This method enabled us todiscuss different cases and categorise them appropriately. Figure 2shows a photograph of the final layout, which shows the relativequantity of each layout.4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONThe table-top presentation of the strategies (Figure 2) gives a quickvisual overview, showing that three and four view-layouts are mostfrequent. Figure 3 shows the trend, that as the view count increasesthere is less agreement in design strategies. We realise that the pur-pose of the visualisation would change depending on the quantity ofviews used: with fewer views a user interacts with specific views;with many views the user is less likely to manipulate one view, butFigure 3: Bar chart showing the quantity for each view layout. Onaverage designers use 4.5 views, when ignoring the small-multipledisplays of 11 and more views.gains an overview of the information from all views. We can calcu-late an average of the large-view multiple-view tools by removingthe 37 tools (from 340) that have more than 10 views, and calculatethat the average view layout is 4.5 views.We have started to investigate the structures and layouts andtasks associated with these views, which will be presented infollow-on work. We estimate that on average 25% of all layoutstrategies are unique, and there is less similarly with higher viewcounts. This demonstrates that developers are creating individuallayout designs, but the majority of the design layouts are similar;which gives us hope to provide quantitative view guidelines. Wealso notice that while our simple view count method may expressthat views are similar, in practice they may include different forms.They are less similar when they are investigated in detail. We alsonotice that certain layout configurations afford particular visualisa-tions and tasks. For example, those that contain a long thin vieware typically used for a timeline, or a line graph.We acknowledge limitations to our study. We focused on the pastsix years of tools presented at IEEE VIS. While we have looked ata broad range of structures we only present the topology resultsin this paper. We only present results on view juxtaposition, andnot on superposition, overlay or nesting. We also acknowledge thatthe visualisation domain is evolving. Many visualisation tools arepresented on the Web, developers are non-academic and thereforewould not present their work at the IEEE VIS conference, and thereis a rise of immersive and interactive visualisation experiences. Infact, we believe that there are many opportunities to look beyondWIMP based (fixed screen) solutions [7], and we believe that thischange will have an impact on the area of multiple views.5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSWe acknolwedge early discussions with Chris Weaver and ChrisNorth and discussions with Panagiotis Ritsos.REFERENCES[1] M. Gleicher. Considerations for visualizing comparison. IEEE Trans.Vis. Comput. Graph., 24(1):413–423, Jan 2018.[2] M. Gleicher, D. Albers, R. Walker, I. Jusufi, C. D. Hansen, and J. C.Roberts. Visual comparison for information visualization. InformationVisualization, 10(4):289–309, 2011.[3] W. Javed and N. Elmqvist. Exploring the design space of compositevisualization. In 2012 IEEE Pacific Vis. Symp., pages 1–8, Feb 2012.[4] Z. Qu and J. Hullman. Keeping multiple views consistent: Constraints,validations, and exceptions in visualization authoring. IEEE Trans. Vis.Comput. Graph., 24(1):468–477, Jan 2018.[5] J. C. Roberts. On encouraging multiple views for visualization. In Proc.Information Visualization, pages 8–14. IEEE, Jul 1998.[6] J. C. Roberts. State of the art: Coordinated multiple views in ex-ploratory visualization. In Proc. CMV 2007, pages 61–71, July 2007.[7] J. C. Roberts, P. D. Ritsos, S. K. Badam, D. Brodbeck, J. Kennedy,and N. Elmqvist. Visualization beyond the desktop–the next big thing.IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 34(6):26–34, Nov 2014.[8] M. Q. Wang Baldonado, A. Woodruff, and A. Kuchinsky. Guidelinesfor using multiple views in information visualization. In Proc. AVI,pages 110–119. ACM, 2000.

Study of Multiple View Layout Strategies in Visualisation

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Study of Multiple View Layout Strategies in Visualisation

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