Although some guidelines (e.g., based on architectural principles) have been proposed for designing Virtual Environments (VEs), several usability problems can be identified only by studying the behavior of real users in VEs. This paper proposes a tool, called VU-Flow, that is able to automatically record usage data of VEs and then visualize it in formats that make it easy for the VE designer to visually detect peculiar users' behaviors and thus better understand the effects of her design choices. In particular, the visualizations concern: i) the detailed paths followed by single users or groups of users in the VE, ii) areas of maximum (or minimum) users' flow, iii) the parts of the environment more seen (or less seen) by users, iv) detailed replay of users visits. We show examples of how these visualizations allow one to visually detect useful information such as the interests of users, navigation problems, users' visiting style. Although this paper describes how VU-Flow can be used in the context of VEs, it is interesting to note that the tool can be also applied to the study of users of location-aware mobile devices in physical environments.
{"title":"A visual tool for tracing users' behavior in Virtual Environments","authors":"L. Chittaro, Lucio Ieronutti","doi":"10.1145/989863.989868","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/989863.989868","url":null,"abstract":"Although some guidelines (e.g., based on architectural principles) have been proposed for designing Virtual Environments (VEs), several usability problems can be identified only by studying the behavior of real users in VEs. This paper proposes a tool, called VU-Flow, that is able to automatically record usage data of VEs and then visualize it in formats that make it easy for the VE designer to visually detect peculiar users' behaviors and thus better understand the effects of her design choices. In particular, the visualizations concern: i) the detailed paths followed by single users or groups of users in the VE, ii) areas of maximum (or minimum) users' flow, iii) the parts of the environment more seen (or less seen) by users, iv) detailed replay of users visits. We show examples of how these visualizations allow one to visually detect useful information such as the interests of users, navigation problems, users' visiting style. Although this paper describes how VU-Flow can be used in the context of VEs, it is interesting to note that the tool can be also applied to the study of users of location-aware mobile devices in physical environments.","PeriodicalId":215861,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129736342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andrés Moreno, Niko Myller, E. Sutinen, M. Ben-Ari
We present a program visualization tool called Jeliot 3 that is designed to aid novice students to learn procedural and object oriented programming. The key feature of Jeliot is the fully or semi-automatic visualization of the data and control flows. The development process of Jeliot has been research-oriented, meaning that all the different versions have had their own research agenda rising from the design of the previous version and their empirical evaluations. In this process, the user interface and visualization has evolved to better suit the targeted audience, which in the case of Jeliot 3, is novice programmers. In this paper we explain the model for the system and introduce the features of the user interface and visualization engine. Moreover, we have developed an intermediate language that is used to decouple the interpretation of the program from its visualization. This has led to a modular design that permits both internal and external extensibility.
{"title":"Visualizing programs with Jeliot 3","authors":"Andrés Moreno, Niko Myller, E. Sutinen, M. Ben-Ari","doi":"10.1145/989863.989928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/989863.989928","url":null,"abstract":"We present a program visualization tool called Jeliot 3 that is designed to aid novice students to learn procedural and object oriented programming. The key feature of Jeliot is the fully or semi-automatic visualization of the data and control flows. The development process of Jeliot has been research-oriented, meaning that all the different versions have had their own research agenda rising from the design of the previous version and their empirical evaluations. In this process, the user interface and visualization has evolved to better suit the targeted audience, which in the case of Jeliot 3, is novice programmers. In this paper we explain the model for the system and introduce the features of the user interface and visualization engine. Moreover, we have developed an intermediate language that is used to decouple the interpretation of the program from its visualization. This has led to a modular design that permits both internal and external extensibility.","PeriodicalId":215861,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128011880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Computer Science introductory courses are known to be difficult for students. Kaasboll [1] reports that drop-out or failure rates vary from 25 to 80 % world-wide. The explanation is related to the very nature of programming: "programming is having a task done by a computer" [2]. We can notice three internal difficulties in this definition:• The task itself. How do we define it, and specify it?• The abstraction process. In order to "have it done by..." students need to create a static model covering each task behavior.• The "cognitive gap". It is difficult for novice programmers to model the computer, and its "mindset", which is required to express the task model in a computer-readable way. The bad usability of programming languages increases this difficulty.The lack of interactivity in the editing-running-debugging loop is often pointed as an important aggravating factor for these difficulties. In the mid-seventies, Smith [3] introduced with Pygmalion another programming paradigm: Programming by Examples, where algorithms are not described abstractly, but are demonstrated through concrete examples. This approach involves several advantages for novices. It allows them to work concretely, and to express the solution in their own way of thinking, instead of having to embrace a computer-centered mindset. The programming process becomes interactive, and as PbE languages are "animated" languages, no translation from the dynamic process to any static representation is required.In this paper we investigate both the novice programmer and existing PbE languages, to show how visual and example-based paradigms can be used to improve programming teaching. We give some elements of a new Example-based Programming environment, called Melba, based on this study, which has been designed to help novice programmers learning to program.
{"title":"Example-based programming: a pertinent visual approach for learning to program","authors":"Nicolas Guibert, P. Girard, L. Guittet","doi":"10.1145/989863.989924","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/989863.989924","url":null,"abstract":"Computer Science introductory courses are known to be difficult for students. Kaasboll [1] reports that drop-out or failure rates vary from 25 to 80 % world-wide. The explanation is related to the very nature of programming: \"programming is having a task done by a computer\" [2]. We can notice three internal difficulties in this definition:• The task itself. How do we define it, and specify it?• The abstraction process. In order to \"have it done by...\" students need to create a static model covering each task behavior.• The \"cognitive gap\". It is difficult for novice programmers to model the computer, and its \"mindset\", which is required to express the task model in a computer-readable way. The bad usability of programming languages increases this difficulty.The lack of interactivity in the editing-running-debugging loop is often pointed as an important aggravating factor for these difficulties. In the mid-seventies, Smith [3] introduced with Pygmalion another programming paradigm: Programming by Examples, where algorithms are not described abstractly, but are demonstrated through concrete examples. This approach involves several advantages for novices. It allows them to work concretely, and to express the solution in their own way of thinking, instead of having to embrace a computer-centered mindset. The programming process becomes interactive, and as PbE languages are \"animated\" languages, no translation from the dynamic process to any static representation is required.In this paper we investigate both the novice programmer and existing PbE languages, to show how visual and example-based paradigms can be used to improve programming teaching. We give some elements of a new Example-based Programming environment, called Melba, based on this study, which has been designed to help novice programmers learning to program.","PeriodicalId":215861,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces","volume":"104 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124810329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper describes two visualisation algorithms that give an impression of current activity on a web site. Both focus on giving a sense of the trail of individual visitors within the web space and showing their navigation paths. Past web activity is used to produce a spatial mapping of pages, which results in highly traversed page links lying close together in the 2D visualisation space. Pages visited by typical individual visitors thus form intelligible paths when plotted in the visualisation space. Both techniques attempt to enhance user awareness and experience, but they differ in their balance between utility and aesthetics.
{"title":"Quantum web fields and molecular meanderings: visualising web visitations","authors":"Geoffrey P. Ellis, A. Dix","doi":"10.1145/989863.989895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/989863.989895","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes two visualisation algorithms that give an impression of current activity on a web site. Both focus on giving a sense of the trail of individual visitors within the web space and showing their navigation paths. Past web activity is used to produce a spatial mapping of pages, which results in highly traversed page links lying close together in the 2D visualisation space. Pages visited by typical individual visitors thus form intelligible paths when plotted in the visualisation space. Both techniques attempt to enhance user awareness and experience, but they differ in their balance between utility and aesthetics.","PeriodicalId":215861,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces","volume":"163 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123786903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The paper describes a framework supporting the creation of 3D user interfaces to visualize awareness information about the cooperation context of distributed actors. The paper discusses the motivations behind the framework and illustrates ThreeDmap, an editor allowing the creation and customization of 3D interfaces supporting the perception of awareness information.
{"title":"Perceiving awareness information through 3D representations","authors":"Fabrizio Nunnari, C. Simone","doi":"10.1145/989863.989947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/989863.989947","url":null,"abstract":"The paper describes a framework supporting the creation of 3D user interfaces to visualize awareness information about the cooperation context of distributed actors. The paper discusses the motivations behind the framework and illustrates ThreeDmap, an editor allowing the creation and customization of 3D interfaces supporting the perception of awareness information.","PeriodicalId":215861,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122279963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CommonGIS is a developing software system for exploratory analysis of spatial data. It includes a multitude of tools applicable to different data types and helping an analyst to find answers to a variety of questions. CommonGIS has been recently extended to support exploration of spatio-temporal data, i.e. temporally variant data referring to spatial locations. The set of new tools includes animated thematic maps, map series, value flow maps, time graphs, and dynamic transformations of the data. We demonstrate the use of the new tools by considering different analytical questions arising in the course of analysis of thematic spatio-temporal data.
{"title":"Interactive visual tools to explore spatio-temporal variation","authors":"N. Andrienko, G. Andrienko","doi":"10.1145/989863.989940","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/989863.989940","url":null,"abstract":"CommonGIS is a developing software system for exploratory analysis of spatial data. It includes a multitude of tools applicable to different data types and helping an analyst to find answers to a variety of questions. CommonGIS has been recently extended to support exploration of spatio-temporal data, i.e. temporally variant data referring to spatial locations. The set of new tools includes animated thematic maps, map series, value flow maps, time graphs, and dynamic transformations of the data. We demonstrate the use of the new tools by considering different analytical questions arising in the course of analysis of thematic spatio-temporal data.","PeriodicalId":215861,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132667636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Biodiversity databases have recently become widely available to the public and to other researchers. To retrieve information from these resources, users must understand the underlying data schemas even though they often are not content experts. Many other domains share this problem.We developed an interface, TaxonTree, to visualize the taxonomic hierarchy of animal names. We applied integrated searching and browsing so that users need not have complete knowledge either of appropriate keywords or the organization of the data.Our qualitative user study of TaxonTree in an undergraduate course is the first to describe usage patterns in the biodiversity domain. We found that tree-based interaction and visualization aided users' understanding of the data. Most users approached biodiversity data by browsing, using common, general knowledge rather than the scientific keyword expertise necessary to search using traditional interfaces. Users with different levels of interest in the domain had different interaction preferences.
{"title":"How users interact with biodiversity information using TaxonTree","authors":"Bongshin Lee, C. Parr, D. Campbell, B. Bederson","doi":"10.1145/989863.989918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/989863.989918","url":null,"abstract":"Biodiversity databases have recently become widely available to the public and to other researchers. To retrieve information from these resources, users must understand the underlying data schemas even though they often are not content experts. Many other domains share this problem.We developed an interface, TaxonTree, to visualize the taxonomic hierarchy of animal names. We applied integrated searching and browsing so that users need not have complete knowledge either of appropriate keywords or the organization of the data.Our qualitative user study of TaxonTree in an undergraduate course is the first to describe usage patterns in the biodiversity domain. We found that tree-based interaction and visualization aided users' understanding of the data. Most users approached biodiversity data by browsing, using common, general knowledge rather than the scientific keyword expertise necessary to search using traditional interfaces. Users with different levels of interest in the domain had different interaction preferences.","PeriodicalId":215861,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130833307","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
OPAL (Online PArtner Lens) is an application designed to match project requirements with suitable teams and individuals, and as part of its matching process features an evaluation mechanism designed to elicit measures of trust between potential partners. We describe a matrix-style visualisation that displays these hierarchically structured assessments between sets of OPAL users to allow them to select potential partners. The main feature of the matrix visualisation is the ability for users to assess the context of a specific assessment as the visualisation not only reveals simple related statistics for the two users concerned, but also overlays summaries of related assessor and candidate evaluations as compact and ordered 'value bars' when the user examines information in the matrix. This enables the user to better decide whether a given assessment is in line with what would be expected from an assessor's and candidate's history, or whether it indicates a specifically localised interplay between the two users. Other features include a simple focus+context effect that can reveal the tree-like structure and details of assessments, and filtering assessments by their position in the matrix or by particular assessment attributes.
{"title":"Exploring and examining assessment data via a matrix visualisation","authors":"Martin Graham, J. Kennedy","doi":"10.1145/989863.989886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/989863.989886","url":null,"abstract":"OPAL (Online PArtner Lens) is an application designed to match project requirements with suitable teams and individuals, and as part of its matching process features an evaluation mechanism designed to elicit measures of trust between potential partners. We describe a matrix-style visualisation that displays these hierarchically structured assessments between sets of OPAL users to allow them to select potential partners. The main feature of the matrix visualisation is the ability for users to assess the context of a specific assessment as the visualisation not only reveals simple related statistics for the two users concerned, but also overlays summaries of related assessor and candidate evaluations as compact and ordered 'value bars' when the user examines information in the matrix. This enables the user to better decide whether a given assessment is in line with what would be expected from an assessor's and candidate's history, or whether it indicates a specifically localised interplay between the two users. Other features include a simple focus+context effect that can reveal the tree-like structure and details of assessments, and filtering assessments by their position in the matrix or by particular assessment attributes.","PeriodicalId":215861,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces","volume":"2015 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134407995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Scene-Driver is a software toolkit for the reuse of broadcast animation content to provide new engaging experiences for children. It has been developed and tested using content from the children's television series "Tiny Planets". Scene-Driver can be used to produce variations on a domino-like game. When playing, the child selects from a set of tiles that depict, for example, characters from the series. The child manipulates the direction of a story in the Tiny Planet world by their choice of tile. The successful selection of a tile will result in a scene from the show being played. A scene is defined as a section from an episode which has certain self-contained narrative elements such as conflict introduction, conflict resolution or comedic event. A scene-supervisor uses these descriptions to ensure that as well as having all the properties prescribed by the child's choice of tile, the scenes are presented in a coherent order according to certain plot and directorial principles. Inter-scene continuity is provided in the form of transition scenes which depict the departure and arrival of relevant characters between one scene and the next. Preliminary evaluations have demonstrated the potential of Scene-Driver to produce engaging and usable games based on broadcast content for young children.
{"title":"Scene-Driver: reusing broadcast animation content for engaging, narratively coherent games","authors":"A. Wolff, P. Mulholland, Z. Zdráhal","doi":"10.1145/989863.989876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/989863.989876","url":null,"abstract":"Scene-Driver is a software toolkit for the reuse of broadcast animation content to provide new engaging experiences for children. It has been developed and tested using content from the children's television series \"Tiny Planets\". Scene-Driver can be used to produce variations on a domino-like game. When playing, the child selects from a set of tiles that depict, for example, characters from the series. The child manipulates the direction of a story in the Tiny Planet world by their choice of tile. The successful selection of a tile will result in a scene from the show being played. A scene is defined as a section from an episode which has certain self-contained narrative elements such as conflict introduction, conflict resolution or comedic event. A scene-supervisor uses these descriptions to ensure that as well as having all the properties prescribed by the child's choice of tile, the scenes are presented in a coherent order according to certain plot and directorial principles. Inter-scene continuity is provided in the form of transition scenes which depict the departure and arrival of relevant characters between one scene and the next. Preliminary evaluations have demonstrated the potential of Scene-Driver to produce engaging and usable games based on broadcast content for young children.","PeriodicalId":215861,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124043529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The wide spread of mobile devices in the consumer market has posed a number of new issues in the design of internet applications and their user interfaces. In particular, applications need to adapt their interaction modalities to different portable devices. In this paper we address the problem of defining models and techniques for designing internet based applications that automatically adapt to different mobile devices. First, we define a formal model that allows for specifying the interaction in a way that is abstract enough to be decoupled from the presentation layer, which is to be adapted to different contexts. The model is mainly based on the idea of describing the user interaction in terms of elementary actions. Then, we provide a formal device characterization showing how to effectively implements the AIUs in a multidevice context.
{"title":"Modelling internet based applications for designing multi-device adaptive interfaces","authors":"E. Bertini, G. Santucci","doi":"10.1145/989863.989906","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/989863.989906","url":null,"abstract":"The wide spread of mobile devices in the consumer market has posed a number of new issues in the design of internet applications and their user interfaces. In particular, applications need to adapt their interaction modalities to different portable devices. In this paper we address the problem of defining models and techniques for designing internet based applications that automatically adapt to different mobile devices. First, we define a formal model that allows for specifying the interaction in a way that is abstract enough to be decoupled from the presentation layer, which is to be adapted to different contexts. The model is mainly based on the idea of describing the user interaction in terms of elementary actions. Then, we provide a formal device characterization showing how to effectively implements the AIUs in a multidevice context.","PeriodicalId":215861,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129221145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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