improving revisitation in fisheye views with visit wear
The distortion caused by an interactive fisheye lens can make it difficult for people to remember items and locations in the data space. In this paper we introduce the idea of visit wear - a visual representation of the places that the user has previously visited - as a way to improve navigation in spaces affected by distortion. We outline the design dimensions of visit wear, and report on two studies. The first shows that increasing the distortion of a fisheye view does significantly reduce people's ability to remember object locations. The second study looks at the effects of visit wear on performance in revisitation tasks, and shows that both completion time and error rates are significantly improved when visit wear is present. Visit wear works by changing the revisitation problem from one of memory to one of visual search. Although there are limitations to the technique, visit wear has the potential to substantially improve the usability both of fisheye views and of graphical information spaces more generally.
fisheye views visit wear interaction lens locatability data space paper visualization representation place user navigation design object effect performance completeness timing errors memorialized visual search usability graphics informal focus+context techniques fisheye usability spatial memory edit wear memorability