Ben Shneiderman Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, University of MarylandThe Eyes Have It: User Interfaces for Information Visualization
February 20, 1998
Human perceptual skills are remarkable, but largely underutilized
by current graphical user interfaces. The next generation
of animated GUIs and visual data mining tools can provide users
with remarkable capabilities if designers follow the Visual Information-Seeking
Mantra:
Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand.
But this is only a starting point in the path to understanding
the rich set of information visualizations that have been proposed. Two
other landmarks are:
- Direct manipulation: visual representation of the objects
and actions of interest and rapid, incremental, and reversible
operations
- Dynamic queries: user controlled query widgets, such as sliders
and buttons, that update the result set within 100msec.and are
shown in the FilmFinder, Visible Human Explorer (for National
Library of Medicine's anatomical data), NASA EOSDIS (for environmental
data), and LifeLines (for medical records and personal histories).
As a guide to research, information visualizations can be
categorized into 7 datatypes (1-, 2-, 3-dimensional data, temporal
and multi-dimensional data, and tree and network data) and 7
tasks (overview, zoom, filter, details-on-demand, relate, history,
and extract). Research directions include algorithms for
rapid display update with millions of data points, strategies
to explore vast multi-dimensional spaces of linked data, and
design of advanced user controls.
The following papers may be of interest to read in advance
of the talk. These are all available on the HCIL
website under the Technical Reports. In declining order
of relevance (most important first):
- 93-14
Ahlberg, C., Shneiderman, B. (Sept. 1993)
Visual Information Seeking: Tight coupling of dynamic query filters
with starfield displays, ACM CHI '94 Conference Proc.
(Boston, MA, April 24-28, 1994) 313-317
- 93-01
Shneiderman, B. (Jan. 1993)
Dynamic Queries: for visual information seeking,
IEEE Software, vol. 11, #6 (Nov. 1994) 70-77.
- 95-15
Plaisant, C., Milash, B., Rose, A., Widoff, S., Shneiderman,
B. (Sept. 1995)
Life Lines: Visualizing personal histories, ACM CHI '96 Conference
Proc. (Vancouver, BC, Canada, April 13-18, 1996) 221-227,
color plate 518, http://www.acm.org/sigchi/sigchi96/proceedings.
- 96-13
Shneiderman, B. (July 1996)
The eyes have it: A task by data type taxonomy for information
visualizations, Proc. 1996 IEEE, Visual Languages (Boulder,
CO, Sept.3-6,1996) 336-343.
- 97-01
Shneiderman, B. (January 1997)
Direct Manipulation for Comprehensible, Predictable, and Controllable
User Interfaces, Proceedings of IUI97, 1997 International
Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Orlando, FL, January
6-9, 1997, 33-39.
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Ben Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer
Science, Head of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and
Member of the Institute for Systems Research, all at the University
of Maryland at College Park.
Dr. Shneiderman is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors
in Computer and Information Systems (1980) and Designing the
User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction
(1987, second edition 1992, third edition 1997), Addison-Wesley
Publishers, Reading, MA.
Dr. Shneiderman has co-authored two textbooks, edited three technical
books, and published more than 180 technical papers and book
chapters. His 1993 edited book Sparks of Innovation in Human-Computer
Interaction collects 25 papers from ten years of research at
the University of Maryland. This collection includes Dr.
Shneiderman's seminal paper on direct manipulation, a term he
coined in 1981 to describe the graphical user interface design
principles: visual presentation of objects and actions combined
with pointing techniques to accomplish rapid incremental and
reversible operations.
Ben Shneiderman received his BS from City College of New York
in 1968, his PhD from State University of New York at Stony Brook
in 1973. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Science from
the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada in 1996 and was elected
as a Fellow of the Association for Computing (ACM) in 1997.
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