Investigating the use of a dynamic physical bar chart for data exploration and presentation

Faisal Taher, Yvonne Jansen, Jonathan Woodruff, John Hardy, Kasper Hornbaek, Jason Alexander

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

53 Citations (SciVal)
130 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Physical data representations, or data physicalizations, are a promising new medium to represent and communicate data. Previous work mostly studied passive physicalizations which require humans to perform all interactions manually. Dynamic shape-changing displays address this limitation and facilitate data exploration tasks such as sorting, navigating in data sets whichexceed the fixed size of a given physical display, or preparing “views” to communicate insights about data. However, it is currently unclear how people approach and interact with such data representations. We ran an exploratory study to investigate how nonexperts made use of a dynamic physical bar chart for an open-ended data exploration and presentation task. We asked 16 participants to explore a data set on European values and to prepare a short presentation of their insights using a physical display.We analyze: (1) users’ body movements to understand how they approach and react to the physicalization, (2) their hand-gestures to understand how they interact with physical data, (3) system interactions to understand which subsets of the data they explored and which features they used in the process, and (4) strategies used to explore the data and present observations. We discuss the implications of our findings for the use of dynamic data physicalizations and avenues for future work
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)451-460
Number of pages10
JournalIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Volume23
Issue number1
Early online date11 Aug 2016
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2017

Keywords

  • Shape-changing displays
  • physicalization
  • physical visualization
  • bar charts
  • user behaviour
  • data presentation

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