Information Visualization

Creating good interfaces requires designers to present tasks in appropriate representations. Graphical user interfaces involve visualizing a representation, choosing appropriate metaphors, and providing good interaction techniques such as direct manipulation. While choosing good representations is somewhat of an art, there are methods to help a designer create and develop alternative designs.

Overheads

• Information visualization: Theoretical principles: [Acrobat] [PowerPoint] 
• Information visualization: Application of the principles [Acrobat] [PowerPoint] 
• Optional: Visualizing information on small screen displays: [PowerPoint] [Acrobat]
• Optional: Methods for creating and developing interface ideas: [PowerPoint] [Acrobat] 

Topics covered

• Representations
• Visual Variables
• Example Info Visualization Systems
• Metaphors
• Direct Manipulation
• Optional: The challenges of representing information on small screen displays
• Optional: Methods for creating and developing interface ideas

Required Readings

• Shneiderman, B. (1998) Chapter 15: Information Search and Visualization. 509-549. In Designing the User Interface, Addison Wesley.

Optional Readings

• Baecker Grudin Buxton and Greenberg, Working with Interface Metaphors: p. 147-151, talks about the roles of metaphors in the interface, and how designers can come up with good ones.
• Baecker Grudin Buxton and Greenberg, Visual Information Seeking:  p. 450-456, introduces the notion of tight coupling of dynamic queries and starfield displays.
• Baecker Grudin Buxton and Greenberg, Case C-Freestyle: p. 867-896 describes many aspects of the design of the Freestyle multimedia system, which is based on a pencil and paper metaphor.
• Baecker Grudin Buxton and Greenberg, Tools and Techniques for Creative Design: p. 128-141, describes how we can apply traditions in existing disciplines to creative interface design, how metaphors and user observation can influence creativity, and how ideas can be generated.
• Spence, Information visualization, Chapter 7, it illustrates how the different solutions to the problem of having too large a data set to display work as well as some of their potential drawbacks.

Videos

The visualization videos demonstrate excellent examples of information visualization through animation, fisheye views, visual changes in large overviews of the data, and dynamic queries. The metaphor videos illustrate different metaphors and approaches to representations. These videos change year by year because there are so many good ones to choose from!

Visualization

• Information Visualization using 3D Interactive Animation, by Xerox PARC (1991, SVGR 63)
• Browsing Graphs Using a Fisheye View, by DEC and Brown University (1993, SVGR 88)
• High Interaction Data Visualization (1993, SVGR 88)
• Dynamic Queries, by Shneiderman (1992, SVGR 77)
• Visual information seeking using FilmFinder (1994, SVGR 97)
• Hierarchical visualization with TreeMaps, by U Maryland (1994, SVGR 97)
• Exploring large tables with the Table Lens, by Xerox Parc (1995, ACM CHI Video)
• DragMag Image Magnifier, by Ware (1995, ACM CHI Video)
• Toolglass and magic lenses: the see through interface by Bier (1994, SVGR 97)
• A Taxonomy of See-through tools: the Video, by Bier (1995, ACM CHI Video)
• The movable filter as an interface tool: the Video, by Bier (1995, ACM CHI Video)
• Visualizing large trees using the hyperbolic browser, by Lamping (1996, ACM CHI Video)

Metaphors

• Freestyle, by Wang (1989, SVGR 46)
• Guides 3.0, by Apple Computer (1991, SVGR 63)
• Alternate Reality Kit, by Smith (1987, SVGR 26)
• The DeckScape Web Browser, by Brown (1996, ACM CHI Video)
• The Web book and Web Forager, by Xerox Parc (1996, ACM CHI Video)

In-class teaching tips

The presentation is fairly straight-forward. However, it is difficult to show a "recipe" for crafting good representations without seeing specific examples. To this purpose, I choose from the above videos to illustrate novel and creative interface designs and metaphors. Students tend to be quite impressed by the ideas presented in the videos.

Major sources used to prepare lecture material

• The collection Readings in Information Visualization by Card, Mackinaly and Shneiderman (Morgan Kauffman Press) is the definitive source book of relevant papers.
• The discussion about metaphors is taken both from the reading Working with Interface Metaphors, and from Interface metaphors and user interface design, by Carrol, Mack and Kellog 1988, in Helander (ed.) Handbook of Human Computer Interaction, North Holland.
• Chapters 3 & 4 of Donald Norman's book Things that make us smart provide an excellent background to the cognitive role of representations.
• Edward Tufte's brilliant book set including The visual display of quantitative information and Envisioning information are required reading for anyone designing visual displays.
• The term 'Direct manipulation' was coined by Ben Shneiderman, and some of the discussion of it is inspired from his paper Direct manipulation: A step beyond programming languages, IEEE Computer 1992, 16(8).
• The reading Tools and Techniques for Creative Design supplied pretty well all the raw material for creativity.
• Chapter 7 of Robert Spence's book Information Visualization, organizes how the different approaches to solving the "large data set, limited display space" problem.