CHOOSELA WEB-BASED ENVIRONMENT

FOR ENTRY-LEVEL VISUAL DATA ANALYSIS

Lars Grammel,

CHISEL Group, University of Victoria01-Sep-2010

Goal2

Provide a Flexible and Intuitive

Visual Data Analysis Environment

for InfoVis Novices

Vid

eo

3

Features4

Several visualizations types

charts, graph, timeline, map, tag cloud

Multiple views

View coordination using drag & drop

Drop target highlighting & previews

Highlighting of items across multiple views

Custom sets that act as selections

Filtered views & synchronized selection

Workspace persistence & sharing

Undo / redo

Design Constraints5

Small data sets (up to 5000 items)

Heterogeneous data

Web-based environment

Reuse third party visualization components

Multiple coordinated views

Tight integration of visualization construction and

data analysis

Design Choices6

Written in GWT (Java to JavaScript compilation)

Need to integrate different components (e.g. Flash,

JavaScript)

Author is familiar with Java

Better tool support (unit testing, debugging,

refactoring)

Deployed on Google App Engine (but this is not

required)

Applications tailor Choosel Framework to domain

Architecture7

Choosel Client (in Browser)

Flexvis

Tag Cloud

Simile Timeline

Protovis Charts

Google Maps

Views

Data Management

View Coordination

Workspace

Management

Undo / Redo

Management

Help and Branding

Server

Workspace Persistence &

Sharing

Data Access

Choosel Applications8

Bio-Mixer

Biomedical Ontology Exploration

Work Item Explorer

IBM Jazz Issue Tracking Data

Choosel is open source! http://code.google.com/p/choosel/

Dem

o

9

Usability Study10

Does our interaction approach work in practice? What

usability issues are hampering the interactions?

Laboratory User Study with 8 Participants (& 1 Pilot)

Video Tutorial

Spatio-temporal analysis (2 Tasks)

Earthquakes & Tsunami Warnings

Concept analysis (4 tasks)

Biomedical Ontology Data

Evaluation Questionnaire

Ratings, Open Questions

Reactions11

“Visually pleasing to the eye. Very intuitive in that for the most

part it made sense what each window did in terms of function.

The possibilities of what one can produce with this easy

interface seem enormous.” P7

“[I liked that] everything is connected and interactive.” P9

“It is hard to understand what some of the function does.” P3

Task Completion12

Spatio-Temporal Tasks Concept Tasks on Biomedical Data

P2 f-ps f-ps f-s f-s a n-a

P3 f-ps f-ps f-s f-s f-ps n-a

P4 f-s f-ps f-s f-s n-a n-a

P5 f-s f-s f-s f-s f-ps n-a

P6 f-ps f-ps f-s f-s f-ps a

P7 f-s f-ps f-s f-ps f-ps f-s

P8 f-ps f-ps f-s f-s f-ps n-a

P9 f-ps f-s f-s f-s f-s f-s

1 2 1 2 3 4

f-s: finished, succeeded f-ps: finished, partially succeeded a: attempted n-a: not attempted

Usability/Usefulness of Features13

Multiple Windows14

“I liked being able to view the

timeline and the map at the

same time when exploring

earthquake data.” P5

“Resizing windows was annoying

especially since there is a lot of

space on the screen that I felt

was not used because the

default window size is small.” P5

63% of the participants resized

and moved windows frequently.

Drag and Drop15

“When dragging it was very

helpful to see where you can

drag the item to (by lighting up

the possible windows).” P2

“The drag and drop […] had what

you needed right there. At first

glance everything seemed

easier, but as you get deeper

into the tasks I got confused on

how things actually worked.” P7

Highlighting of Items and Sets16

“The use of selections and

highlighting in the different

windows is very helpful to

organize what one is

doing.” P2

Custom Sets17

“I liked the fact that I could easily

look for a specific earthquake

set.” P4

“I could not use a lasso function to

quickly highlight multiple items

in any view.” P5

Current & Future Work18

More Visualizations

Visualization Configuration

Automatic Visualization

Faceted Navigation

Thank you!19

Lars Grammel

CHISEL Group, University of Victoria

Lars.Grammel@gmail.com

Choosel is open source!

http://code.google.com/p/choosel/