Designing effective program visualization tools for reducing user's cognitive effort

Abstract

Program visualization holds great potential for conveying information about the state and behavior of a running program. However, barriers exist to the realization of this potential, and the limited knowledge about the factors that affect program visualization makes the identification of these barriers difficult. We present arguments that the economy of information and tasks related to the visualization environment has a significant impact on the user's performance in solving algorithmic problems. We apply this knowledge to develop an approach for creating application-specific visualizations solely through interactions with program visualizations and textual views of the computation, thus promoting economy of interaction. The approach consists of a multiple technical contributions that are surveyed in the paper.

Visualization of the Static Aspects of Software: A Survey

“…Human cognitive and perceptual capabilities are effectively exploited using smooth, interactive animations to show the part of the hierarchy focused upon. These animations allow the human perceptual system to immediately track the position of the software component focused upon [68]. This technique represents a lower cognitive burden than if the selected part is just highlighted without animated transition.…”

“…Using the latter effectively is important to reduce the user cognitive load [66], [67], [68]. Indeed, how people perceive and interact with a visualization tool strongly influences their understanding of the data, hence the usefulness of the system [65], [69], [70].…”

Data structure visualization with latex and prefuse

“…For over a decade, algorithm/data-structure visualization has been an active research area in computer science education; for a partial list of representative projects, please refer to [12,6,10,9,2,1,5,7] and check the "SIGCSE: Education Links" page 3 . In his Ph.D. dissertation, Roessling cites several of the methods that have been tried in the past [8].…”

3D Hierarchical Edge bundles to visualize relations in a software city metaphor

“…Software visualization [1] relies on the human perceptual system [11]. Indeed, using the latter effectively is important to reduce the user cognitive load [12]- [14]. A technique to ease the understanding of source code is to represent it through suitable abstractions and metaphors.…”