We introduce MultiPiles, a visualization to explore time‐series of dense, weighted networks. MultiPiles is based on the physical analogy of piling adjacency matrices, each one representing a single ...temporal snapshot. Common interfaces for visualizing dynamic networks use techniques such as: flipping/animation; small multiples; or summary views in isolation. Our proposed ‘piling’ metaphor presents a hybrid of these techniques, leveraging each one's advantages, as well as offering the ability to scale to networks with hundreds of temporal snapshots. While the MultiPiles technique is applicable to many domains, our prototype was initially designed to help neuroscientists investigate changes in brain connectivity networks over several hundred snapshots. The piling metaphor and associated interaction and visual encodings allowed neuroscientists to explore their data, prior to a statistical analysis. They detected high‐level temporal patterns in individual networks and this helped them to formulate and reject several hypotheses.
Do you spend a lot of time during the design process wondering what users really need? Do you hate those endless meetings where you argue how the interface should work? Have you ever developed ...something that later had to be completely redesigned? Paper Prototyping can help. Written by a usability engineer with a long and successful paper prototyping history, this book is a practical, how-to guide that will prepare you to create and test paper prototypes of all kinds of user interfaces. You'll see how to simulate various kinds of interface elements and interactions. You'll learn about the practical aspects of paper prototyping, such as deciding when the technique is appropriate, scheduling the activities, and handling the skepticism of others in your organization. Numerous case studies and images throughout the book show you real world examples of paper prototyping at work. Learn how to use this powerful technique to develop products that are more useful, intuitive, efficient, and pleasing: * Save time and money - solve key problems before implementation begins * Get user feedback early - use it to focus the development process * Communicate better - involve development team members from a variety of disciplines * Be more creative - experiment with many ideas before committing to one*Enables designers to solve design problems before implementation begins *Five case studies provide real world examples of paper prototyping at work *Delves into the specifics of what types of projects paper prototyping is and isn't good for.
We present a novel visual exploration method based on small multiples and large singles for effective and efficient data analysis. Users are enabled to explore the state space by offering multiple ...alternatives from the current state. Users can then select the alternative of choice and continue the analysis. Furthermore, the intermediate steps in the exploration process are preserved and can be revisited and adapted using an intuitive navigation mechanism based on the well‐known undo‐redo stack and filmstrip metaphor. As proof of concept the exploration method is implemented in a prototype. The effectiveness of the exploration method is tested using a formal user study comparing four different interaction methods. By using Small Multiples as data exploration method users need fewer steps in answering questions and also explore a significantly larger part of the state space in the same amount of time, providing them with a broader perspective on the data, hence lowering the chance of missing important features. Also, users prefer visual exploration with small multiples over non‐small multiple variants.
Today's computer–human interfaces are typically designed with the assumption that they are going to be used by an able-bodied person, who is using a typical set of input and output devices, who has ...typical perceptual and cognitive abilities, and who is sitting in a stable, warm environment. Any deviation from these assumptions may drastically hamper the person's effectiveness—not because of any
inherent barrier to interaction, but because of a mismatch between the person's effective abilities and the assumptions underlying the interface design.
We argue that automatic personalized interface generation is a feasible and scalable solution to this challenge. We present our
Supple system, which can automatically generate interfaces adapted to a person's devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities. In this paper we formally define interface generation as an optimization problem and demonstrate that, despite a large solution space (of up to 10
17 possible interfaces), the problem is computationally feasible. In fact, for a particular class of cost functions,
Supple produces exact solutions in under a second for most cases, and in a little over a minute in the worst case encountered, thus enabling run-time generation of user interfaces. We further show how several different design criteria can be expressed in the cost function, enabling different kinds of personalization. We also demonstrate how this approach enables extensive user- and system-initiated run-time adaptations to the interfaces after they have been generated.
Supple is not intended to replace human user interface designers—instead, it offers alternative user interfaces for those people whose devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities are not sufficiently addressed by the hand-crafted designs. Indeed, the results of our study show that, compared to manufacturers' defaults, interfaces automatically generated by
Supple significantly improve speed, accuracy and satisfaction of people with motor impairments.
ShelXle: a Qt graphical user interface for SHELXL Hübschle, Christian B.; Sheldrick, George M.; Dittrich, Birger
Journal of applied crystallography,
December 2011, Volume:
44, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
ShelXle is a graphical user interface for SHELXL Sheldrick, G. M. (2008). Acta Cryst. A64, 112–122, currently the most widely used program for small‐molecule structure refinement. It combines an ...editor with syntax highlighting for the SHELXL‐associated .ins (input) and .res (output) files with an interactive graphical display for visualization of a three‐dimensional structure including the electron density (Fo) and difference density (Fo–Fc) maps. Special features of ShelXle include intuitive atom (re‐)naming, a strongly coupled editor, structure visualization in various mono and stereo modes, and a novel way of displaying disorder extending over special positions. ShelXle is completely compatible with all features of SHELXL and is written entirely in C++ using the Qt4 and FFTW libraries. It is available at no cost for Windows, Linux and Mac‐OS X and as source code.
This paper describes a framework that serves as a reference for classifying user interfaces supporting multiple targets, or multiple contexts of use in the field of context-aware computing. In this ...framework, a context of use is decomposed into three facets: the end users of the interactive system, the hardware and software computing platform with which the users have to carry out their interactive tasks and the physical environment where they are working. Therefore, a context-sensitive user interface is a user interface that exhibits some capability to be aware of the context (context awareness) and to react to changes of this context. This paper attempts to provide a unified understanding of context-sensitive user interfaces rather than a prescription of various ways or methods of tackling different steps of development. Rather, the framework structures the development life cycle into four levels of abstraction: task and concepts, abstract user interface, concrete user interface and final user interface. These levels are structured with a relationship of reification going from an abstract level to a concrete one and a relationship of abstraction going from a concrete level to an abstract one. Most methods and tools can be more clearly understood and compared relative to each other against the levels of this framework. In addition, the framework expresses when, where and how a change of context is considered and supported in the context-sensitive user interface thanks to a relationship of translation. In the field of multi-target user interfaces is also introduced, defined, and exemplified the notion of plastic user interfaces. These user interfaces support some adaptation to changes of the context of use while preserving a predefined set of usability properties.
Interactions within virtual environments often require manipulating 3D virtual objects. To this end, researchers have endeavoured to find efficient solutions using either traditional input devices or ...focusing on different input modalities, such as touch and mid‐air gestures. Different virtual environments and diverse input modalities present specific issues to control object position, orientation and scaling: traditional mouse input, for example, presents non‐trivial challenges because of the need to map between 2D input and 3D actions. While interactive surfaces enable more natural approaches, they still require smart mappings. Mid‐air gestures can be exploited to offer natural manipulations mimicking interactions with physical objects. However, these approaches often lack precision and control. All these issues and many others have been addressed in a large body of work. In this article, we survey the state‐of‐the‐art in 3D object manipulation, ranging from traditional desktop approaches to touch and mid‐air interfaces, to interact in diverse virtual environments. We propose a new taxonomy to better classify manipulation properties. Using our taxonomy, we discuss the techniques presented in the surveyed literature, highlighting trends, guidelines and open challenges, that can be useful both to future research and to developers of 3D user interfaces.
Interactions within virtual environments often require manipulating 3D virtual objects. We survey the state‐of‐the‐art in 3D object manipulation, ranging from traditional desktop approaches to touch and mid‐air interfaces, to interact in diverse virtual environments. We propose a new taxonomy to better classify manipulation properties. Using our taxonomy, we discuss the techniques presented in the surveyed literature, highlighting trends, guidelines and open challenges, that can be useful both to future research and to developers of 3D user interfaces.
The State-of-the-Art of Set Visualization Alsallakh, Bilal; Micallef, Luana; Aigner, Wolfgang ...
Computer graphics forum,
February 2016, Volume:
35, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Sets comprise a generic data model that has been used in a variety of data analysis problems. Such problems involve analysing and visualizing set relations between multiple sets defined over the same ...collection of elements. However, visualizing sets is a non‐trivial problem due to the large number of possible relations between them. We provide a systematic overview of state‐of‐the‐art techniques for visualizing different kinds of set relations. We classify these techniques into six main categories according to the visual representations they use and the tasks they support. We compare the categories to provide guidance for choosing an appropriate technique for a given problem. Finally, we identify challenges in this area that need further research and propose possible directions to address these challenges. Further resources on set visualization are available at http://www.setviz.net.
Sets comprise a generic data model that has been used in a variety of data analysis problems. Such problems involve analysing and visualizing set relations between multiple sets defined over the same collection of elements. However, visualizing sets is a non‐trivial problem due to the large number of possible relations between them. We provide a systematic overview of state‐of‐the‐art techniques for visualizing different kinds of set relations.We classify these techniques into six main categories according to the visual representations they use and the tasks they support. We compare the categories to provide guidance for choosing an appropriate technique for a given problem.
Medicine prescriptions play an important role in medical treatments. More insight in medicine prescription behavior can lead to more efficient and effective treatments, as well as reflection on ...prescription behavior for specific physicians, types of medicines, or classes of patients. Most current medical visualization systems show health data only from the perspective of patients, whereas to understand prescription behavior multiple perspectives are relevant. We present a new approach to visualize prescription data from four different perspectives: physician, patient, medicine, and prescription. Information about physicians, patients, and medicines is shown in three tables; relations between selected items in these tables are shown using custom glyphs and histograms. These tables can also be used to define selections of prescriptions which can be compared to each other by showing a variety of metrics. This enables physicians and possibly other stakeholders to perform a wide variety of queries and inspections, while the use of familiar metaphors, such as tables and histograms, enables them to use the system in short time. This was confirmed by an evaluation session with six neurologists from an institute of epileptology. Our system is tailored to medicine prescription data, but we argue that the underlying pattern in the data is ubiquitous, and that hence our approach can be useful for many other cases where A provides B to C.
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