Evaluating the Effect of Timeline Shape on Visualization Task Performance

Abstract

SpiralCircle Vertical line Horizontal line Non-recurrentRecurrent Mixed Alignment experiment http://127.0.0.1:8000/test_questions.html Figure 1. We evaluate the effect on task performance of 4 timeline shapes (left to right) across 3 types of temporal event sequence data (top to bottom). These images are simplified versions of the stimuli that we used in our experiment. Each dot on a timeline represents an event and has a specific categorical color to highlight where the dataset has recurrent events. Dashed lines highlight the recurrent intervals or a set of recurrent events. ABSTRACTTimelines are commonly represented on a horizontal line, which is not necessarily the most effective way to visualize temporal event sequences. However, few experiments have evaluated how timeline shape influences task performance. We present the design and results of a controlled experiment run on Amazon Mechanical Turk (n = 192) in which we evaluate how timeline shape affects task completion time, correctness, and user preference. We tested 12 combinations of 4 shapeshorizontal line, vertical line, circle, and spiral -and 3 data types -recurrent, non-recurrent, and mixed event sequences. We found good evidence that timeline shape meaningfully affects user task completion time but not correctness and that users have a strong shape preference. Building on our results, we present design guidelines for creating effective timeline visualizations based on user task and data types. A free copy of this paper, the evaluation stimuli and data, and code are available at https://osf.io/qr5yu/

Evaluation of 1D Selection Techniques for Mobile Visualizations

“…This helps us comprehend visual choices, but little is known about their consequences: which shape easiest to interact with? Some recent works compare timeline designs in terms of understandability or effectiveness [3,11,18,35,38], and some investigate the effect of tooltips on interaction on desktop [2], yet performance in most of the design space is still unknown, especially on mobile.…”

Towards Identification and Mitigation of Task-Based Challenges in Comparative Visualization Studies

“…Figure 1: In a comparative study, Di Bartolomeo et al [21] measured the effect of timeline shape on accuracy and time of user to find an event ("earthquake") on the timeline. The timelines shown in this figure are an abstract representation of the stimuli used in the original evaluation study.…”

“…In visualization literature, comparative studies are used across a wide range of application domains to evaluate a variety of visualization techniques or encodings. For instance, Di Bartolomeo et al [21] designed a comparative study to evaluate the effect of different timeline shapes on a subset of timeline tasks (Fig. 1).…”

“…Based on our personal experience with comparative studies (e.g., [11,12,21,47,59]) and the analysis of challenges from previous research articles [26,33,49,55] we identify four task-based challenges (C1-C4) that can directly affect the validity of comparative studies and thus influence the overall adoption and usability of the evaluation results: In this paper, for each challenge we discuss its effect on the validity of different stages of a comparative study. Moreover, to investigate if these challenges exist in published academic literature, we survey tree visualization comparative studies and analyze 20 studies to identify if they are threatened by these challenges.…”

Remote and Collaborative Virtual Reality Experiments via Social VR Platforms

“…The advent of crowdsourced evaluation methods have reshaped the way many scientists construct and conduct scientific experiments. In human computer interaction (HCI) research, crowdsourcing is used extensively to recruit remote participants for a wide variety of user studies [2,11,15,17]. Crowdsourcing can have advantages over traditional in-lab evaluation methods -faster turnaround times, asynchronous participation, larger and varied recruitment populations [26] -though may also introduce challenges such as catching speeders and cheaters [17].…”