Monday, September 19, 2011

Reactions: Toward a Deeper Understanding of the Role of Interaction in Information Visualization

We had read in one of the previous papers that a picture is more than a thousand words. This paper laid more emphasis on making that picture more interactive than just presenting a static image. When it comes to visualization of data, a static image is not much better than a table of data. Both are not very easy to comprehend. I totally agree with the paper that to provide an effective visualization to the end-user there are two main components, namely- representation of data using graphics and the interaction between the user & the visualized data. Providing basic interaction methods like zoom, select, filter etc is as important as the selection of charts and colors to be used. Also I like the section when the authors talk about the user intent. The end-user intent should be the primary focus while designing a visualization. The classification of the interaction techniques, which could be applied at various levels of granularity, is the heart of this paper. The ultimate goal is to provide the user with interaction techniques that give then the ability to manipulate the representations directly or indirectly and hence interpret it more easily. This paper has surely broadened my perspective.

0 comments: