Research On Viewport Switching Cost In The Information Visualization Space For Decision-Making

With the spring of Big Data and Intelligence Era,people are penetrated into the information space constituted by data,information and interactive media.Information space is the scaffold for users to conduct visual analysis,decision-making and judgment,but it still arises the embarrassment for information visualization design.Facing the information with vast volume,high dimension,complex structure and high refreshing rate,the single-view visualization becomes feeble.It paves the way for multiple-view visualizations,which have already been employed in hypermedia,large-scale visual analytics platforms and safety-critical systems.In multiple-view visualizations,the user needs to frequently switch visual attention between viewports to gain decision cues,and construct an overall understanding of the entire information space.In this situation,frequent viewport switches may give rise to the dilemma that the user loses the sense of direction in the information visualization space,which will consequently lead to disorientation.Disorientation can be embodied by the sluggish attention focus shift and the deficit of users’ survey knowledge about the entire system.It makes the process of acquiring decision cues and judgment less efficient.This study fuses research paradigms and methodology from linguistics,human factors engineering and experimental psychology into information visualization design and usability evaluation,with the aim of enhancing the efficiency and productivity of visual analytics and decision-making.Supported by the framework of information visualization space,decision space and cognition space,the study focuses on the process of foraging and integrating decision cues in the information visualization space and conducts throughout research on the switching cost caused by viewport switches in the information visualization space.Research highlights are listed as follows.(1)Conceptual mappings between the geographic space and information visualization space are constructed based on the conceptual metaphor theory.Then,a hierarchical conceptual model of elements in the information visualization space and a decision task taxonomy are established,and interaction-cognition conceptual model depicting the interaction between human and multiple-view visualizations is proposed.(2)Based on the cognition flow in the multiple-view information visualizations,as well as the attentional management and mental map construction,the concept of viewport switching cost is proposed in the thesis.As well,its manifestations,underlying mechanisms together with its contributors are analyzed,which constitute the concept system of viewport switching cost.(3)Existence of viewport switching cost is confirmed through a dual-task experimental environment consisting of auditory discrimination task and visual target counting task.The impact of visual cues and working memory offloading on viewport switching cost is analyzed,and comparative studies are conducted to investigate the viewport switching cost led by different levels of visual information density,different viewport presentations and information encodings.(4)Based on the theoretical analysis and experiment results,design strategies for information visualization design are advanced.These design strategies aim to reduce the viewport switching cost in the information visualization space.The across-disciplinary research methodology lays foundations for future information visualization design.As well,the time-space-structure/semantics cube and the concept system of viewport switching cost lead the visual perception research in information visualizations to a more fine-grained level;they also deepen the understanding of visual attention in multiple-view information visualizations.Design strategies concluded from the experimental studies can be adopted to resolve users’ attentional management and mental map construction problems in two-dimensional multiple-view visualizations.Research methods and conclusions in the current study can also provide insights into the space updating and visual continuity in the virtual reality scenario.