Abstract Designing introductory materials is extremely important when developing new information visualization techniques. All users, regardless of their domain knowledge, first must learn how to interpret the visually encoded information in order to infer knowledge from visualizations. Yet, despite its significance, there has been little research on how to design effective introductory materials for information visualization. This paper presents a study on the design of online guides that educate new users on how to utilize information visualizations, particularly focusing on the employment of exercise questions in the guides. We use two concepts from educational psychology, learning type (or learning style) and teaching method, to design four unique types of online guides. The effects of the guides are measured by comprehension tests of a large group of crowdsourced participants. The tests covered four visualization types (graph, scatter plot, storyline, and tree map) and a complete range of visual analytics tasks. Our statistical analyses indicate that online guides which employ active learning and the top‐down teaching method are the most effective. Our study provides quantitative insight into the use of exercise questions in online guides for information visualizations and will inspire further research on design considerations for other elements in introductory materials.

Design methodologies for information visualizations are typically based on the assumption that the users will be fully engaged in the visual exploration of the displayed information. However, recent research suggests that there is an increasing diversity in how users engage with modern visualizations, and that the traditional design theories do not always satisfy the varied users needs. In this paper, we present a new design concept, engagement-versatile design, for visualizations that target users with a variety of engagement styles. Without losing generality, we demonstrate the feasibility of this concept through the designing of a system called Stock Lamp, an engagement-versatile visualization that helps users keep track of the stock market in real-time. This design process includes identifying different modes of engagement, deriving design implications from each engagement-mode, and applying them to the visualization's design. Our user study shows that Stock Lamp is able to consistently relay market information even when the users are multi-tasking. We believe this study establishes a new concept that promotes a systematic design approach that leverages both theoretical and empirical design methodologies for future visualization development.

This paper presents a novel framework for applying storyline visualizations to streaming data. The framework includes three components: a new data management scheme for processing and storing the incoming data, a layout construction algorithm specifically designed for incrementally generating storylines from streaming data, and a layout refinement algorithm for improving the legibility of the visualization. By dividing the layout computation to two separate components, one for constructing and another for refining, our framework effectively provides the users with the ability to follow and reason dynamic data. The evaluation studies of our storyline visualization framework demonstrate its efficacy to present streaming data as well as its superior performance over existing methods in terms of both computational efficiency and visual clarity.

Web applications are abundant and used daily by a variety of people. Planning a trip, for example, has become much easier with Web applications such as Google Maps. Nevertheless, to thoroughly design a personalized trip, the user often needs to manually search for additional information and mentally combine all the information to make many key decisions. To address the need for a comprehensive system, we have designed OnMyWay, a mash up system which effectively incorporates the ability to search points of interest and to assess essential information for designing personalized road trips. This paper presents our task-oriented design for presenting information and supporting user interactions applied to OnMyWay, and provides evaluations of the system's design and usability based on two informal user studies.

Anonymized Call Detail Records (CDRs) contain positional information of large populations and therefore have been extensively analyzed to understand human mobility. Due to the temporally sparse and spatially coarse nature of the data, most of these studies have focused on primitive aspects of movements such as travel distance and speed. Incorporating underlying geographic information in these analyses would allow analysts to put these movements into context and to gain deeper insight into how metropolitan areas function. In this paper, we present a set of procedures for inferring mobile users' mobility patterns while retaining the context of underlying geography. We apply these methods to our case study on New York City anonymized CDRs. We find that our methods verify current areal semantics and commuting rush-hour patterns, and we also derive further implications regarding geographic, demographic, and other effects on human mobility.

Storyline visualization is a technique used to depict the temporal dynamics of social interactions. This visualization technique was first introduced as a hand-drawn illustration in XKCD's "Movie Narrative Charts" [21]. If properly constructed, the visualization can convey both global trends and local interactions in the data. However, previous methods for automating storyline visualizations are overly simple, failing to achieve some of the essential principles practiced by professional illustrators. This paper presents a set of design considerations for generating aesthetically pleasing and legible storyline visualizations. Our layout algorithm is based on evolutionary computation, allowing us to effectively incorporate multiple objective functions. We show that the resulting visualizations have significantly improved aesthetics and legibility compared to existing techniques.

The pervasive concept of cloud computing suggests that visualization, which is both data and computing intensive, is a perfect cloud computing application. This paper presents a sketch of an interface design for an online visualization service. To make such a service attractive to a wider audience, its user interface must be simple and easy to use for both casual and expert users. We envision an interface that supports visualization processes mainly directed by browsing and assessing existing visualizations in terms of images and videos will be very appealing to, in particular, casual users. That is, the aim is to maximize the utilization of the rich visualization data on the web. Without losing generality, we consider volume data visualization applications for our interface design. We also discuss issues in organizing online visualization data, and constructing and managing a rendering cloud.