Procedure with self-study articles
- You will often have to study in detail a relevant scientific article for homework.
- After having read the article, you have to formulate an in-depth question or comment about the paper. See below for examples of good and bad questions.
- If you don't send a suitable question for each of the articles that you have read on time, you will not get a passing grade.
See the lecture pogramme for details on what you have to read and when you have to submit your question. Usually you have to submit your question the evening before the class during which we will discuss that article.
- Use the Google Form that we will supply for each paper to submit that paper's comment.
Examples of questions
These examples of questions come from the InfoVis course of Dr. Tamara Munzner at UBC in Canada. As you can see below, first order questions concerning facts that are mentioned in the paper or can be looked up in 2 minutes are NOT good enough. From your question or comment it should be apparent that you've studied the paper in depth and have thought about its implications.
NOT good enough
- Well, what exactly Pad++ is? Is it a progarmming library or a set of API or a programming language? how can we use it in our systems, for xample may be programming in TCL or OpenGL may be?
- I learned some from this paper and got some ideas of my project.
Just good enough
- This seems like something fun to play around with, are there any real implementations of this? Has a good application for this type of zooming been found? Is there still a real need for this now that scroll wheels have become prevailent and most people don’t even use the scroll bar anymore?
- Playing with the applet, I find I like half of their approach. It’s nice to zoom out as my scroll speed increases, but then I don’t like the automatic zoom in when I stop scrolling. Searching the overview I found the location I wanted, but while I paused and looked at the overview, I fell back in to the closeup. I think they need to significantly dampen their curve.
Better
- It would be interesting to compare the approach in this paper to some other less-mathematically-thought-out zoom and pan solutions to see if it is really better. Sometimes ”faking it” is perceived to be just as good (or better) by users.
- The space-scale diagrams provided a clear intuition of why zooming out, panning then zooming in is a superior navigation technique. However, I found the diagram too cumbersome for practical use, especially for objects with zoom-dependent representations (Figure 11).
Excellent
- I’m curious as to what would have happened if the authors had simply preselected the values of the free parameters for the participants in their user study, and then had the users compare their technique to the standard magnification tools present in a ’normal’ application (much like the space-scale folks did). Could it be that the users are ‘manufacturing’ a large standard deviation in the free parameter specifications by settling for values that merely produce a local improvement in their ability to manipulate the interface, instead of actively searching for an optimal valuation scheme?
In a related vein, the speed-dependent automatic zooming met with mixed success on some applications. Isn’t this success related to how ”compressible” some information is? i.e. because zooming must necessarily throw out some information, it isn’t obvious which information to keep around to preserve the navigable structure.