Comparison of Node-Link and Hierarchical Edge Bundling Layouts: A User Study

Abstract

Visually investigating large network-like structures is a challenging task. Several approaches have been proposed in the past: node-link diagrams, adjacency matrices, and, more recently, hierarchical edge bundles. We present a recent experiment that compares the effectiveness of the classical node-link diagrams with the more recent hierarchical bundled edges. The users involved several computer science practitioners, the data ranged from graphs of several hundreds to several tens of hundreds of nodes, the tasks involved answering a number of structural overview as well as detailed questions involved system dependencies