Interactive animated mobile information visualisation

Abstract

While the potential of mobile information visualisation is widely recognized, there is still relatively little research in this area and few practical guidelines for the design of mobile information visualisation interfaces. Indeed, it would appear that there is still a general feeling in the interface design community that mobile visualisation should be limited to simple operations and small scale data. Information visualisation research has concentrated thus far on desktop PCs and larger displays while interfaces for more compact mobile device have been neglected. This is in spite of the increasing popularity and widespread use of smart-phones and other new mobile technologies. In this paper we address this issue by developing a set of low-level interface design guidelines for mobile information visualisation development. This is done by considering a basic set of interactions and relating these to mobile device limitations. Our results suggest that the mindful application of existing information visualisation techniques can overcome many mobile device limitations and that proper implementation of interaction mechanisms and animated view transitions are key to effective mobile information visualisation. This is illustrated with case studies looking at a coordinated map and timeline interface for geo-temporal data, a distorted scatter-plot, and a space filling hierarchy view.