Monday, September 19, 2011

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

The authors have presented four interface approaches in the domain of information visualization: Overview+detail, Zoom&Panning, Focus+context and Cue based systems. It is sometimes confusing as to why the authors consider or report only first 3 categories, but actually they have discussed 4 such approaches.

The authors gave a brief illustration of each of these approaches, their usages, advantages and disadvantages etc., Though the paper is quite informative, it was quite difficult to find out the relevant information, and the organization of the paper is quite confusing.

There are several references and comparisons to the Fisheyes view in the paper. I read some other interesting articles about Fisheyes view from InfoVis wiki, and tried to get a hang of how it actually works. I think, Fisheyes view is very good for usage, and I didn't feel distracted or gone off the target when switching from global context to local context or vice-versa. But, there are several such articles which report of the confusion in using the tool.

Overall, the paper was quite informative, but a little lengthy and confusing. I would make it as a reference, if I intend to research in the direction of user interfaces.

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