Navigation patterns and usability of zoomable user interfaces with and without an overview

Abstract

The literature on information visualization establishes the usability of interfaces with an overview of the information space, but for zoomable user interfaces, results are mixed. We compare zoomable user interfaces with and without an overview to understand the navigation patterns and usability of these interfaces. Thirty-two subjects solved navigation and browsing tasks on two maps. We found no difference between interfaces in subjects' ability to solve tasks correctly. Eighty percent of the subjects preferred the interface with an overview, stating that it supported navigation and helped keep track of their position on the map. However, subjects were faster with the interface without an overview when using one of the two maps. We conjecture that this difference was due to the organization of that map in multiple levels, which rendered the overview unnecessary by providing richer navigation cues through semantic zooming. The combination of that map and the interface without an overview also improved subjects' recall of objects on the map. Subjects who switched between the overview and the detail windows used more time, suggesting that integration of overview and detail windows adds complexity and requires additional mental and motor effort.

References

1. Ahlberg, C. and Shneiderman, B. 1994. Visual information seeking: Tight coupling of dynamic query filters with starfield displays. In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '94, Boston MA, Apr. 24--28). C. Plaisant, Ed. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 313--317.
2. Baldonado, M. Q. W., Woodruff, A., and Kuchinsky, A. 2000. Guidelines for using multiple views in information visualization. In Proocedings of the 5th International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI'2000, Palermo, Italy, May 24--26). L. Tarrantino, Ed. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 110--119.
3. Beard, D. B. and Walker, J. Q. 1990. Navigational techniques to improve the display of large two-dimensional spaces. Behav. Inform. Techn. 9, 6, 451--466.
4. Bederson, B. B. 2001. PhotoMesa: A zoomable image browser using quantum treemaps and bubblemaps. In UIST 2001, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, CHI Lett. 3, 2, 71--80.
5. Bederson, B. B. and Boltman, A. 1999. Does animation help users build mental maps of spatial information. In Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (INFOVIZ'99, San Francisco, Calif., Oct. 24--29). G. Wills and D. Keim, Eds. IEEE Press, New York, N.Y., 28--35.
6. Bederson, B. B. and Hollan, J. D. 1994. Pad++: A zooming graphical interface system. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'94, Marina del Rey, Calif., Nov. 2--4). P. Szekely, Ed. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 17--26.
7. Bederson, B. B., Hollan, J. D., Perlin, K., Meyer, J., Bacon, D., and Furnas, G. W. 1996. Pad++: A zoomable graphical sketchpad for exploring alternate interface physics. J. Vis. Lang. Comput. 7, 1, 3--31.
8. Bederson, B. B., Meyer, J., and Good, L. 2000. Jazz: An extensible zoomable user interface graphics toolkit in Java. In UIST'00, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, CHI Lett. 2, 2, 171--180.
9. Card, S. K., Mackinlay, J. D., and Shneiderman, B. 1999. Readings in Information Visualization. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, Calif.
10. Card, S. K., Robertson, G. G., and Mackinlay, J. D. 1991. The information visualizer, an information workspace. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'91, New Orleans, La, Apr. 27--May 2). S. P. Robertson, G. M. Olson, and J. S. Olson, Eds. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 181--188.
11. Carr, D., Plaisant, C., and Hasegawa, H. 1998. Designing a real-time telepathology workstation to mitigate communication delays. Interac. Comput. 11, 1, 33--52.
12. Chen, C. and Czerwinski, M. P. 2000. Special Issue on Empirical Evaluation of Information Visualizations. Internat. J. Hum.-Comput. Studies 53, 5.
13. Chin, J. P., Diehl, V. A., and Norman, K. L. 1988. Development of an instrument for measuring user satisfaction of the human-computer interface. In Proceeding of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '88, Washington, D.C., May 15--19). E. Soloway, D. Frye, and S. B. Sheppard, Eds. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 213--218.
14. Combs, T. and Bederson, B. B. 1999. Does zooming improve image browsing? In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Digital Libraries (DL '99, Berkeley, Calif., Aug. 11--14). N. Rowe and E. A. Fox, A., Eds. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 130--137.
15. Druin, A., Stewart, J., Proft, D., Bederson, B., and Hollan, J. D. 1997. KidPad: A design Collaboration between children, technologists, and educators. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '97, Atlanta, Ga, Mar. 22--27). S. Pemperton, Ed. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 463--470.
16. Eick, S. G., Steffen, J. L., and Sumner, E. E. 1992. Seesoft---a tool for visualizing line oriented software statistics. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 18, 11, 957--968.
17. Frank, A. U. and Timpf, S. 1994. Multiple representations for cartographic objects in a multi-scale tree---an intelligent graphical zoom. Comput. Graph. 18, 6, 823--829.
18. Furnas, G. W. and Bederson, B. B. 1995. Space-scale diagrams: Understanding multiscale interfaces. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '95, Denver, Colo., May 7--11). I. R. Katz, R. Mach, L. Marks, M. B. Rosson, and J. Nielsen, Eds. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 234--241.
19. Furnas, G. W. and Zhang, X. 1998. MuSE: A multiscale editor. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '98, San Fransisco, Calif., Nov. 1--4). E. Mynatt and R. Jacob, Eds. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 107--116.
20. Furnas, G. W. and Zhang, X. 2000. Illusions of infinity: Feedback for infinite worlds. In UIST 2000, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, CHI Lett. 2, 2, 237--238.
21. Ghosh, P. and Shneiderman, B. 1999. Zoom-only vs. overview-detail pair: A study in browsing techniques as applied to patient histories. University of Maryland Technical Report CS-TR-4028. ftp://ftp.cs.umd.edu/pub/hcil/Reports-Abstracts-Bibliography/99-12html/99-12.html.
22. Guo, Huo, Zhang, Weiwei, and Wu, Jing. 2000. The Effect of zooming speed in a zoomable user interface. Report from Student HCI Online Research Experiments (SHORE), http://otal.umd.edu/SHORE2000/zoom/.
23. Hightower, R. R., Ring, L. T., Helfman, J. I., Bederson, B. B., and Hollan, J. D. 1998. Graphical multiscale Web histories: A study of PadPrints. In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext (Hypertext '98, Pittsburgh, Pa., June 20--24). ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 58--65.
24. Hornbæk, K. and Frøkjær, E. 1999. Do thematic maps improve information retrieval? In IFIP TC.13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT '99, Edingburgh, Scotland, Aug. 30--Sep. 3). M. A. Sasse and C. Johnson, Eds. IOS Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 179--186.
25. Hornbæk, K. and Frøckjær, E. 2001. Reading electronic documents: The usability of linear, fisheye, and overview+detail interfaces. In CHI 2001, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI Lett. 3, 1, 293--300.
26. Igarishi, T. and Hinckley, K. 2000. Speed-dependent automatic zooming for browsing large documents. In UIST 2000, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, CHI Lett. 2, 2, 139--148.
27. Jul, S. and Furnas, G. W. 1998. Critical zones in desert fog: Aids to multiscale navigation. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '98, San Fransisco, Calif., Nov. 1--4). E. Mynatt and R. Jacob, Eds. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 97--106.
28. North, C. and Shneiderman, B. 2000. Snap-together visualization: evaluating coordination usage and construction. Internat. J. Hum.-Comput. Studies, 53, 5, 715--739.
29. North, C., Shneiderman, B., and Plaisant, C. 1995. User controlled overviews of an image library: A case study of the visible human. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries (DL '96, Bethesda, Md., Mar. 20--23). E. A. Fox and G. Marchionini, Eds. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 74--82.
30. Páez, L. B., da Silva-Fh., J. B., and Marchionini, G. 1996. Disorientation in electronic environments: A study of hypertext and continuous zooming interfaces. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science (ASIS '96, Baltimore, Md, Oct. 19--24). S. Harding, Ed., 58--66.
31. Perlin, K. and Fox, D. 1993. Pad: An alternative approach to the computer interface. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Conference on Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH '93, Anaheim, Calif., Aug. 2--6). J. T. Kajiya, Ed. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 57--64.
32. Plaisant, C., Carr, D., and Shneiderman, B. 1995. Image browsers: Taxonomy, guidelines, and informal specifications. IEEE Softw. 12, 2, 21--32.
33. Plaisant, C. M. B., Rose, A., and Shneiderman, B. 1996. Life lines: Visualizing personal histories. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '96, Vancouver, B. C., Canada, Apr. 13--18). B., Nardi and G. C., van der Veer, Eds. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 221--227.
34. Pook, S., Lecolinet, E., Vaysseix, G., and Barillot, E. 2000. Context and interaction in zoomable user interfaces. In Proocedings of the 5th International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI 2000, Palermo, Italy, May 23--26). L. Tarrantino, Ed. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 227--231.
35. Raskin, J. 2000. The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.
36. Schaffer, D., Zuo, Z., Greenberg, S., Bartram, L., Dill, J., Dubs, S., and Roseman, M. 1996. Navigating hierarchically clustered networks through fisheye and full-zoom methods. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 3, 2, 162--188.
37. Shneiderman, B. 1998. Designing the User Interface. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.
38. Vinson, N. G. 1999. Design guidelines for landmarks to support navigation in virtual environments. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '99, Pittsburg, Pa, May 15--20). M. G., Williams, M. W., Altom, K., Ehrlich, and W. Newman, Eds. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 278--285.
39. Ware, C. 2000. Information Visualization: Perception for Design. Morgan Kaufmann, San Fransisco, Calif.
40. Woodruff, A., Landay, J., and Stonebreaker, M. 1998a. Constant information density in zoomable interfaces. In Proocedings of the 4th International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI '98, L'Aquila, Italy, May 24--27). T. Catarci, M. F. Costabile, G. Santucci, and L. Tarantino, Eds. 110--119.
41. Woodruff, A., Landay, J., and Stonebreaker, M. 1998b. Goal-directed zoom. In Summary of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '98, Los Angeles, Calif., Apr. 18--23). C.-M. Karat, A. Lund, J. Coutaz, and J. Karat, Eds. ACM Press, New York, N.Y., 305--306.

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Graphics systems and interfaces

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • HCI design and evaluation methods

    • Interaction devices

      • Graphics input devices

    • Interaction paradigms

  • Interaction design

    • Interaction design process and methods

      • User centered design