skip to main content
research-article
Free Access

Design principles for visual communication

Published:01 April 2011Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

How to identify, instantiate, and evaluate domain-specific design principles for creating more effective visualizations.

Skip Supplemental Material Section

Supplemental Material

gerry-apr2011_agrawala_design-principles.mp4

References

  1. Agrawala, M. Visualizing Route Maps. Ph.D. Thesis, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2002; http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/maneesh_thesis/ Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. Agrawala, M., Phan, D., Heiser, J., Haymaker, J., and Klingner, J. Designing effective step-by-step assembly instructions. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH (San Diego, July 27--31). ACM Press, New York, 2003, 828--837. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. Agrawala, M. and Stolte, C. Rendering effective route maps: Improving usability through generalization. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH (Los Angeles, Aug. 12--17). ACM Press, New York, 2001, 241--250. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. Chase, W.G. Spatial representations of taxi drivers. In Acquisition of Symbolic Skills, D.R. Rogers and J.A. Sloboda, Eds. Plenum Press, New York, 1983, 391--405.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  5. Gantz, J., Chute, C., Manfrediz, A., Minton, S., Reinsel, D., Schlichting, W., and Toncheva, A. The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011. IDC White Paper, Mar. 2008; http://www.emc.com/about/destination/digitaluniverse/Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. Goldberg, J., Stimson, M., Lewenstein, M., Scott, N., and Wichansky, A. Eye tracking in Web search tasks: Design implications. In Proceedings of the Eye Tracking Research and Applications Symposium (New Orleans, Mar. 25--27). ACM Press, New York, 2002, 51--58. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  7. Grabler, F., Agrawala, M., Li, W., Dontcheva, M., and Igarashi, T. Generating photo manipulation tutorials by demonstration. ACM Transactions on Graphics 27, 3 (Aug. 2009), 66:1--66:9. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. Grabler, F., Agrawala, M., Sumner, R.W., and Pauly, M. Automatic generation of tourist maps. ACM Transactions on Graphics 27, 3 (Aug. 2008), 100:1--100:11. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. Heiser, J., Phan, D., Agrawala, M., Tversky, B., and Hanrahan, P. Identification and validation of cognitive design principles for automated generation of assembly instructions. In Proceedings of Advanced Visual Interfaces (Gallipoli, Italy, May 25--28). ACM Press, New York, 2004, 311--319. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. Hodges, E. The Guild Handbook of Scientific Illustration. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1989.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. Karpenko, O., Li, W., Mitra, N., and Agrawala, M. Exploded-view diagrams of mathematical surfaces. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 16, 6 (Oct. 2010), 1311--1318. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  12. Kopf, J., Agrawala, M., Salesin, D., Bargeron, D., and Cohen, M.F. Automatic generation of destination maps. ACM Transactions on Graphics 29, 6 (Dec. 2010), 158:1--158:12. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. Li, W., Agrawala, M., Curless, B., and Salesin, D. Automated generation of interactive exploded-view diagrams. ACM Transactions on Graphics 27, 3 (Aug. 2008), 101:1--101:11. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. Li, W., Ritter, L., Agrawala, M., Curless, B., and Salesin, D. Interactive cutaway illustrations of complex 3D models. ACM Transactions on Graphics 26, 3 (July 2007), 31:1--31:11. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  15. London, B. and Upton, J. Photography. Longman Publishing Group, New York, 1997.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. Lynch, K. The Image of the City. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1960.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. MacEachren, A.M. How Maps Work. The Guilford Press, New York, 1995.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  18. Mijksenaar, P. and Westendorp, P. Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design. Joost Elffers Books, New York, 1999.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  19. Mitra, N.J., Yang, Y., Yan, D., Li, W., and Agrawala, M. Illustrating how mechanical assemblies work. ACM Transactions on Graphics 29, 4 (July 2010), 29:58:1--58:12. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  20. Robison, W., Boisjoly, R., Hoeker, D., and Young, S. Representation and misrepresentation: Tufte and the Morton Thiokol engineers on the Challenger. Science and Engineering Ethics 8, 1 (Jan. 2002), 59--81.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  21. Santella, A., Agrawala, M., DeCarlo, D., Salesin, D., and Cohen, M. Gaze-based interaction for semi-automatic photo cropping. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Apr. 24--27). ACM Press, New York, 771--780. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  22. Sorrows, M. and Hirtle, S. The nature of landmarks for real and electronic spaces. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (Stade, Germany, Aug. 25--29). Springer-Verlag, London, U.K., 1999, 37--50. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  23. Tufte, E. Visual Explanations. Graphics Press, Cheshire, CT, 1997.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  24. Tufte, E. Envisioning Information. Graphics Press, Cheshire, CT, 1990. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  25. Tversky, B. and Lee, P. Pictorial and verbal tools for conveying routes. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (Stade, Germany, Aug. 25--29). Springer-Verlag, London, U.K., 1999, 51--64. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  26. Vollick, I, Vogel, D., Agrawala, M., and Hertzmann, A. Specifying label layout by example. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Newport, RI, Oct. 7--10). ACM Press, New York, 2007, 221--230. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. Design principles for visual communication

              Recommendations

              Reviews

              John S. Edwards

              This interesting and well-written paper discusses an approach to creating useful, simple visual images based on more complex computer-generated representations. The authors examine two genres: maps intended for tourists, and exploded design assemblies. The work uses human-generated drawings as fundamental templates. As the authors point out, the explosion of complex representations makes it imperative to be able to easily create visual representations for human consumption. The paper describes three design principles: identification, instantiation, and evaluation. To gain insight into identification, the authors examine what they determine to be useful hand-drawn samples. Perhaps one of the most iconic is the 1933 tourist map of the London Underground. It is an abstract of the city map, showing the stations one by one as well as the various transfer points. As millions of city dwellers and tourists can testify, it is an elegant solution, its form copied in city after city. The authors then abstract the principles to the problem of generating route maps or tourist guides. They develop a set of attributes, such as position, size, and the orientation of roads and landmarks, to instantiate the map in question. The simplified map provides only information of interest to the targeted audience-in this case, tourists. One example uses what is likely a Google route map showing the highlighted route in all of its cartographic glory. The hand-drawn route map focuses on turns more than distances and directions. The final visual map is a simplified representation of the actual route. The authors apply the same techniques to assembly drawings. Starting with the usual explosion isometric drawing, they show a hand-drawn assembly instruction and, finally, a computer-generated simple set of steps to assemble the object. For all of the techniques, the authors employ user feedback and user studies in an attempt to evaluate their process. This is an interesting approach to the problem. By necessity, the paper is narrow in scope in order to allow the authors to explore the subject. The paper is entirely devoid of mathematics and theorems, and is easy to read. It also includes an extensive set of references. The authors would welcome "more sophisticated evaluation methodology [to] provide stronger evidence for these models [and advance the work]." Online Computing Reviews Service

              Access critical reviews of Computing literature here

              Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.

              Comments

              Login options

              Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

              Sign in

              Full Access

              • Published in

                cover image Communications of the ACM
                Communications of the ACM  Volume 54, Issue 4
                April 2011
                139 pages
                ISSN:0001-0782
                EISSN:1557-7317
                DOI:10.1145/1924421
                Issue’s Table of Contents

                Copyright © 2011 ACM

                Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

                Publisher

                Association for Computing Machinery

                New York, NY, United States

                Publication History

                • Published: 1 April 2011

                Permissions

                Request permissions about this article.

                Request Permissions

                Check for updates

                Qualifiers

                • research-article
                • Popular
                • Refereed

              PDF Format

              View or Download as a PDF file.

              PDF

              eReader

              View online with eReader.

              eReader

              HTML Format

              View this article in HTML Format .

              View HTML Format