Reaction: A Review of Overview+Detail, Zooming, and Focus+Context Interfaces

The author's description of various categories of interface approaches and their pros and cons are very informative and provide a direction on the design and evaluation of user efficient interfaces. The overview+detail form of interfaces are very useful in representing a lot of detail in the visualization. The use of this type of interfaces help to create interfaces that cater to a large audience. But, the problems arising with this method can be overcome by using one or more other methods in combination with this. If we use context+detail along with this method, we can still represent all the data and change the representation dynamically if the user requests a different view.

The analysis of empirical results cannot be an exact measure of an interface approach as empirical results are not always correct and a more in detail analysis of the interface in various situations can help in proving more insight into the interface. The fish eye distortion can be good in some situations. The cue based approaches are also helpful in situations where the visualization needs to be used to represent data to a naive user and where the interaction can be limited or none. So, every approach has its own advantages and disadvantages and proper combination of these approaches based on the context can help in creating a better visualization.