Click and brush: A novel way of finding correlations and relationships in visualizations

Brushing is a commonly used interaction technique that allows users to select items or an area of the visualization as the user moves the mouse. Brushing is often used with multiple views, where any co-related information is simultaneously highlighted in these linked views. Brushing is a direct manipulation technique where interaction is performed directly with the visualization. Similar effects can be engendered through indirect manipulation, using dynamic query sliders. In fact, such indirect manipulation can be more effective as the user is able to both highlight and constrain interesting features. In this paper we present a new brushing technique, called 'Click and Brush', that allows the user to both highlight correlations and constrain intersections in the data using direct manipulation. Users are able to highlight data (brush), fix this subset (click) and explore further intersections (subsets) of this data through further brushing operations.