Coarse-grained approaches to customization allow the user to enable or disable groups of features at once, rather than individual features. While this may reduce the complexity of customization and encourage more users to customize, the research challenges of designing such approaches have not been fully explored. To address this limitation, we conducted an interview study with 14 professional software developers who use an integrated development environment that provides a role-based, coarse-grained approach to customization. We identify challenges of designing coarse-grained customization models, including issues of functionality partitioning, presentation, and individual differences. These findings highlight potentially critical design choices, and provide direction for future work.

Abstract With advances in computer graphics, a number of innovative approaches to information visualization have been developed (e.g., Card et al, 1991 ). Some of these approaches create a mapping between information and corresponding structure in a virtual world. The resulting virtual worlds can be fully three dimensional (3D) or they can be implemented as a series of 2D birds‐eye “snapshots” that are traversed as if they were in 3D, using operations such as panning and zooming interactively (2.5D). This paper reports a study that contrasted 3D and 2.5D performance for people with differing levels of spatial and structure learning ability. Four data collection methods were employed: search task scoring; subjective questionnaires; navigational activity logging and analysis; and administration of tests for spatial and structure‐learning abilities. Analysis of the results revealed statistically significant effects of user abilities, and information environment designs. Overall, this research did not find a performance advantage for using a 3D rather than a 2.5D virtual world. In addition, users in the lowest quartile of spatial ability had significantly lower search performance in the 3D environment. The findings suggest that individual differences in traits such as spatial ability may be important in determining the usability and acceptability of 3D environments.

Hunter Gatherer is an interface that lets Web users carry out three main tasks: (1) collect components from within Web pages; (2) represent those components in a collection; (3) edit those component collections. Our research shows that while the practice of making collections of content from within Web pages is common, it is not frequent, due in large part to poor interaction support in existing tools. We engaged with users in task analysis as well as iterative design reviews in order to understand the interaction issues that are part of within-Web-page collection making and to design an interaction that would support that process.We report here on that design development, as well as on the evaluations of the tool that evolved from that process, and the future work stemming from these results, in which our critical question is: what happens to users perceptions and expectations of web-based information (their web-based information management practices) when they can treat this information as harvestable, recontextualizable data, rather than as fixed pages?

Desktop virtual reality (VR) offers a powerful environment for visualizing structure in large information sets. In well-designed virtual worlds, users can employ skills from wayfinding in the real world. The paper reports on the development and testing of a series of prototype VR worlds, designed to support navigation during information visualization and retrieval. Results indicated that users subjectively preferred naturalistic environments over abstract ones, but that users objectively searched better in environments that had rigorous hierarchical structure, and support for both overview and detail. In comparison with a hypertext interface, the final virtual world design elicited more enjoyment, without worsening search performance significantly, when appropriate training time was allowed. This prototype shows the potential value of navigable VR that is engaging and useful for everyday information exploration.

Proper information visualization has always been viewed as an important tool for research. Traditionally, however, it was regarded as only a tool, with information content and visualization being analogous to an object and its representation, respectively. These days, visualization is increasingly seen as an integral part of information content, without which data collections may lose significant value. This paper is devoted to applying a new visualization scheme-SequenceWorld-to a genetics database. We view a collection of genetic sequences as a browsable virtual world. Sequences cluster according to their homologies. Their relative position, colour and shape codings offer a direct visual perception of a significant amount of information, which would otherwise be available only via extensive analysis of numerical and textual data. We discuss the usability of SequenceWorld for completing traditional and novel genetic database search tasks, particularly since a holistic view of a complete genome has recently become possible.