Monday, September 19, 2011

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


The paper discusses three visualization schemes Overview+Detail, Zooming and Focus+Context. The paper gives detailed explanation of each category with example and figures. Further the author refers to some empirical evaluation studies to compare the effectiveness of each category. The authors infers few important points like, Overview+Detail is better for understanding of text based documents whereas, focus+context technique can provide better usability in terms of cosmetic effects. Overview+Detail and zooming along with panning usually act as complementary. 

The author warns us that incorrectly implemented zooming techniques can be difficult for user to understand and can hamper effectiveness of zooming. The article shows how focus+context can be helpful for non-spatial representation. The working of Mac OS X Dock is interesting read. The article also mentions cue based techniques which can help to focus on information of interest. Overall I found this article very useful and informative for visualization schemes.

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