Designing Information Visualizations

Sponsor	John Stasko stasko@cc.gatech.edu 253 CoC
Area	Human-Computer Interaction

Problem
What news should you read? Which stocks should you invest in? Which car should you buy? People face many questions like these every day. For questions such as these, some pertinent added knowledge or information can provide a great help. Unfortunately, too often we have the opposite problem---we're in an information overload glut. Clearly, the internet and WWW have contributed to this problem. So, how does a person find what they need among all the information and then make a decision based on that data?

One way that information can be coalesced, filtered and structured better so that people can harness it is through the use of visualizations. You must have heard the expression that, "A picture is worth a thousand words." This is the guiding principle behind the field of Information Visualization.

Information visualization differs from data visualization in that data visualization is usually concerned with visualizing data that has some physical correspondence, often in domains such as the sciences, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Information visualization refers to visualizing more abstract data such as text, data bases and financial information. The two fields do have much in common, however.

The purpose of this project is for you to learn more about the field of information visualization, and to be a little creative and design a visualization of your own. First, read the articles below to learn about existing research in this field. Then choose one of the two topics below, and design an information visualization for it. You only need to design this visualization on paper but you should be creative and detailed. Do enough so that someone looking at it can understand what you've done. Think about all the information that someone may want to know about the topics below. See if you can encode this in your visualization.

Topics:

Go to the Yahoo shopping page, shopping.yahoo.com. Type in a query for "scuba". Note how the results are presented. There are many different types of items here and they vary in price greatly. How could someone quickly find what they are interested in? Design a visualization that presents all these results to a user in a more comprehensible, interesting manner.
Go to the web site www.cc.gatech.edu/computing/stats/ and view statistics regarding recent traffic on the College web server. Notice how all the data is presented in lists and tables. Design visualizations to help someone understand this data more easily. Consider the kinds of queries that people would make about this data. Have those questions drive your visualization(s).

Background
Read the following three articles to learn more about this field.

Card, S., Mackinlay, J. and Shneiderman, B., Readings in Information Visualization, Using Visualization to Think, Morgan Kaufmann, 1999, pp. 1-31.
Rao, Ramana and Card, Stuart K., "The Table Lens: Merging Graphical and Symbolic Representations in an Interactive Focus+Context Visualization for Tabluar Information", pp. 318-322, Proceedings of SIGCHI '94, Apr. 1994, Boston, MA.
Chi, Ed and others, "Visualizing the Evolution of Web Ecologies", Proceedings of the SIGCHI '98 Conference, pp. 400-407, Los Angeles, CA, April 1998.

All these articles can be picked up from Prof. Stasko.

For further examples of information visualizations, check out the Smart Money Map of the Stock Market page (www.smartmoney.com/marketmap), the Hyperbolic Tree by Inxight (www.inxight.com), or the Treemap or Sunburst file system browser tools runnable here (~stasko/Public/treemap and ~stasko/Public/sunburst for Solaris). More information is avaiable at the web site for this Fall's Information Visualization Course, CS 7450, ( www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2000/cs7450_fall/).

Deliverables
You should turn in your visualization which will probably be on multiple sheets of paper. It should be accompanied by a 5+ page report which reviews the articles you read (describe what you found most interesting) and that describes your visualization, what it represents, how someone would interact with it, etc.

Evaluation
You will be evaluated on the depth, insight, and thoroughness of your review of this area as well as the creativity and thought put into your visualization. Does it adequately convey the topic matter? Is it a good summary of the pertinent information?