Introducing aesthetics to software visualization
Files
Date issued
2015
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Václav Skala - UNION Agency
Abstract
In software visualization, but also in information visualization in general, there is a great need for evaluation of
visualization metaphors. To reduce the amount of empirical studies a computational approach has been applied
successfully, e.g., to graph visualization. It is based on measurable aesthetic heuristics that are used to estimate the
human perception and the processing of visualizations. This paper lays a foundation for adopting this approach to
any field of information visualization by providing a method, the repertory grid technique, to identify aesthetics
that are measurable, metaphor-specific, and relevant to the user in a structured and repeatable way. We identified
25 unique aesthetics and revealed that the visual appearance of the investigated visualizations is mainly influenced
by the package structure whereby methods are underrepresented. These findings were used to improve existing
visualizations.
Description
Subject(s)
estetika, technika repertoárové mřížky, vizualizace softwaru
Citation
WSCG '2015: short communications proceedings: The 23rd International Conference in Central Europe on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision 2015 in co-operation with EUROGRAPHICS: University of West Bohemia, Plzen, Czech Republic8-12 June 2015, p. 65-73.