Getting Portals to Behave
Chris Olston and Allison Woodruff
Abstract
Data visualization environments help users understand and analyze
their data by permitting interactive browsing of graphical
representations of the data. To further facilitate understanding and
analysis, many visualization environments have special features known
as portals, which are sub-windows of a data canvas. Portals
provide a way to display multiple graphical representations
simultaneously, in a nested fashion. This makes portals an extremely
powerful and flexible paradigm for data visualization. Unfortunately,
with this flexibility comes complexity. There are over a hundred
possible ways each portal can be configured to exhibit different
behaviors. Many of these behaviors are confusing and certain
behaviors can be inappropriate for a particular setting. It is
desirable to eliminate confusing and inappropriate behaviors. In this
paper, we construct a taxonomy of portal behaviors and give
recommendations to help designers of visualization systems decide
which behaviors are intuitive and appropriate for a particular
setting. We apply these recommendations to an example setting that is
fully visually programmable and analyze the resulting reduced set of
behaviors. Finally, we consider a real visualization environment and
demonstrate some problems associated with behaviors that do not follow
our recommendations.
Conference Paper (InfoVis 2000): [PS], [PDF]. Citation: [BibTeX]
Conference Slides (InfoVis 2000): [PPT]