Exploring interactions with physically dynamic bar charts

TY - GEN

T1 - Exploring interactions with physically dynamic bar charts

AU - Taher, Faisal

AU - Hardy, John

AU - Karnik, Abhijit

AU - Weichel, Christian

AU - Jansen, Yvonne

AU - Hornbæk, Kasper

AU - Alexander, Jason

N1 - Conference code: 33

PY - 2015/4/18

Y1 - 2015/4/18

N2 - Visualizations such as bar charts help users reason about data, but are mostly screen-based, rarely physical, and almost never physical and dynamic. This paper investigates the role of physically dynamic bar charts and evaluates new interactions for exploring and working with datasets rendered in dynamic physical form. To facilitate our exploration we constructed a 10 × 10 interactive bar chart and designed interactions that supported fundamental visualisation tasks, specifically: Annotation, navigation, filtering, comparison, organization, and sorting. The interactions were evaluated in a user study with 17 participants. We identify the preferred methods of working with the data for each task (e.g. directly tapping rows to hide bars), highlight the strengths and limitations of working with physical data, and discuss the challenges of integrating the proposed interactions together into a larger data exploration system. In general, physical interactions were intuitive, informative, and enjoyable, paving the way for new explorations in physical data visualizations.

AB - Visualizations such as bar charts help users reason about data, but are mostly screen-based, rarely physical, and almost never physical and dynamic. This paper investigates the role of physically dynamic bar charts and evaluates new interactions for exploring and working with datasets rendered in dynamic physical form. To facilitate our exploration we constructed a 10 × 10 interactive bar chart and designed interactions that supported fundamental visualisation tasks, specifically: Annotation, navigation, filtering, comparison, organization, and sorting. The interactions were evaluated in a user study with 17 participants. We identify the preferred methods of working with the data for each task (e.g. directly tapping rows to hide bars), highlight the strengths and limitations of working with physical data, and discuss the challenges of integrating the proposed interactions together into a larger data exploration system. In general, physical interactions were intuitive, informative, and enjoyable, paving the way for new explorations in physical data visualizations.

KW - information visualization, physical visualizations, shape displays, shape-changing interfaces, tangible user interfaces

U2 - 10.1145/2702123.2702604

DO - 10.1145/2702123.2702604

M3 - Article in proceedings

SN - 978-1-4503-3145-6

SP - 3237

EP - 3246

BT - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

T2 - Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Y2 - 18 April 2015 through 23 April 2015

ER -