The distortion caused by an interactive fisheye lens can make it difficult for people to remember items and locations in the data space. In this paper we introduce the idea of visit wear - a visual representation of the places that the user has previously visited - as a way to improve navigation in spaces affected by distortion. We outline the design dimensions of visit wear, and report on two studies. The first shows that increasing the distortion of a fisheye view does significantly reduce people's ability to remember object locations. The second study looks at the effects of visit wear on performance in revisitation tasks, and shows that both completion time and error rates are significantly improved when visit wear is present. Visit wear works by changing the revisitation problem from one of memory to one of visual search. Although there are limitations to the technique, visit wear has the potential to substantially improve the usability both of fisheye views and of graphical information spaces more generally.

Fisheye views use distortion to provide both local detail and global context in a single continuous view. However, the distorted presentation can make it more difficult to interact with the data; it is therefore not clear whether fisheye views are good choices for interactive tasks. To investigate this question, we tested the effects of magnification and representation on user performance in a basic pointing activity called steering - where a user moves a pointer along a predefined path in the workspace. We looked specifically at magnified steering, where the entire path does not fit into one view. We tested three types of fisheye at several levels of distortion, and also compared the fisheyes with two non-distorting techniques. We found that increasing distortion did not reduce steering performance, and that the fisheyes were faster than the non-distorting techniques. Our results show that in situations where magnification is required, distortion-oriented views can be effective representations for interactive tasks.