information

The Galaxy of News system embodies an approach to visualizing large quantities of independently authored pieces of information, in this case news stories. At the heart of this system is a powerful relationship construction engine that constructs an associative relation network to automatically build implicit links between related articles. To visualize these relationships, and hence the news information space, the Galaxy of News uses pyramidal structuring and visual presentation, semantic zooming and panning, animated visual cues that are dynamically constructed to illustrate relationships between articles, and fluid interaction in a three dimensional information space to browse and search through large databases of news articles. The result is a tool that allows people to quickly gain a broad understanding of a news base by providing an abstracted presentation that covers the entire information base, and through interaction, progressively refines the details of the information space. This research has been generalized into a model for news access and visualization to provide automatic construction of news information spaces and derivation of an interactive news experience.

Normally, the primary purpose of an information display is to convey information. If information displays can be aesthetically interesting, that might be an added bonus. This paper considers an experiment in reversing this imperative. It describes the Kandinsky system which is designed to create displays which are first aesthetically interesting, and then as an added bonus, able to convey information. The Kandinsky system works on the basis of aesthetic properties specified by an artist (in a visual form). It then explores a space of collages composed from information bearing images, using an optimization technique to find compositions which best maintain the properties of the artist's aesthetic expression.

Many applications provide a form-like interface for requesting information: the user fills in some fields, submits the form, and the application presents corresponding results. Such a procedure becomes burdensome if (1) the user must submit many different requests, for example in pursuing a trial-and-error search, (2) results from one application are to be used as inputs for another, requiring the user to transfer them by hand, or (3) the user wants to compare results, but only the results from one request can be seen at a time. We describe how users can reduce this burden by creating custom interfaces using three mechanisms: clipping of input and result elements from existing applications to form cells on a spreadsheet; connecting these cells using formulas, thus enabling result transfer between applications; and cloning cells so that multiple requests can be handled side by side. We demonstrate a prototype of these mechanisms, initially specialised for handling Web applications, and show how it lets users build new interfaces to suit their individual needs.

Re-finding, a common Web task, is difficult when previously viewed information is modified, moved, or removed. For example, if a person finds a good result using the query "breast cancer treatments", she expects to be able to use the same query to locate the same result again. While re-finding could be supported by caching the original list, caching precludes the discovery of new information, such as, in this case, new treatment options. People often use search engines to simultaneously find and re-find information. The Re:Search Engine is designed to support both behaviors in dynamic environments like the Web by preserving only the memorable aspects of a result list. A study of result list memory shows that people forget a lot. The Re:Search Engine takes advantage of these memory lapses to include new results where old results have been forgotten.

Prototyping is the pivotal activity that structures innovation, collaboration, and creativity in design. Prototypes embody design hypotheses and enable designers to test them. Framin design as a thinking-by-doing activity foregrounds iteration as a central concern. This paper presents d.tools, a toolkit that embodies an iterative-design-centered approach to prototyping information appliances. This work offers contributions in three areas. First, d.tools introduces a statechart-based visual design tool that provides a low threshold for early-stage prototyping, extensible through code for higher-fidelity prototypes. Second, our research introduces three important types of hardware extensibility - at the hardware-to-PC interface, the intra-hardware communication level, and the circuit level. Third, d.tools integrates design, test, and analysis of information appliances. We have evaluated d.tools through three studies: a laboratory study with thirteen participants; rebuilding prototypes of existing and emerging devices; and by observing seven student teams who built prototypes with d.tools.

In our previous studies into web design, we found that pens, paper, walls, and tables were often used for explaining, developing, and communicating ideas during the early phases of design. These wall-scale paper-based design practices inspired The Designers' Outpost, a tangible user interface that combines the affordances of paper and large physical workspaces with the advantages of electronic media to support information design. With Outpost, users collaboratively author web site information architectures on an electronic whiteboard using physical media (Post-it notes and images), structuring and annotating that information with electronic pens. This interaction is enabled by a touch-sensitive SMART Board augmented with a robust computer vision system, employing a rear-mounted video camera for capturing movement and a front-mounted high-resolution camera for capturing ink. We conducted a participatory design study with fifteen professional web designers. The study validated that Outpost supports information architecture work practice, and led to our adding support for fluid transitions to other tools.

The Galaxy of News system embodies an approach to visualizing large quantities of independently authored pieces of information, in this case news stories. At the heart of this system is a powerful relationship construction engine that constructs an associative relation network to automatically build implicit links between related articles. To visualize these relationships, and hence the news information space, the Galaxy of News uses pyramidal structuring and visual presentation, semantic zooming and panning, animated visual cues that are dynamically constructed to illustrate relationships between articles, and fluid interaction in a three dimensional information space to browse and search through large databases of news articles. The result is a tool that allows people to quickly gain a broad understanding of a news base by providing an abstracted presentation that covers the entire information base, and through interaction, progressively refines the details of the information space. This research has been generalized into a model for news access and visualization to provide automatic construction of news information spaces and derivation of an interactive news experience.

Using a participatory design process, we created three prototype augmented laboratory notebooks that provide the missing link between paper, physical artifacts and on-line data. The final a-book combines a graphics tablet and a PDA. The tablet captures writing on the paper notebook and the PDA acts as an "interaction lens" or window between physical and electronic documents. Our approach is document-centered, with a software architecture based on layers of physical and electronic information.

We describe a system, implemented as a browser extension, that enables users to quickly and easily collect, view, and share personal Web content. Our system employs a novel interaction model, which allows a user to specify webpage extraction patterns by interactively selecting webpage elements and applying these patterns to automatically collect similar content. Further, we present a technique for creating visual summaries of the collected information by combining user labeling with predefined layout templates. These summaries are interactive in nature: depending on the behaviors encoded in their templates, they may respond to mouse events, in addition to providing a visual summary. Finally, the summaries can be saved or sent to others to continue the research at another place or time. Informal evaluation shows that our approach works well for popular websites, and that users can quickly learn this interaction model for collecting content from the Web.

We describe the current status of Pad++, a zooming graphical interface that we are exploring as an alternative to traditional window and icon-based approaches to interface design. We discuss the motivation for Pad++, describe the implementation, and present prototype applications. In addition, we introduce an informational physics strategy for interface design and briefly compare it with metaphor-based design strategies.

We describe the current status of Pad++, a zooming graphical interface that we are exploring as an alternative to traditional window and icon-based approaches to interface design. We discuss the motivation for Pad++, describe the implementation, and present prototype applications. In addition, we introduce an informational physics strategy for interface design and briefly compare it with metaphor-based design strategies.

The increasing mass of information confronting a business or an individual have created a demand for information management applications. Time-based information, in particular, is an important part of many information access tasks. This paper explores how to use 3D graphics and interactive animation to design and implement visualizers that improve access to large masses of time-based information. Two new visualizers have been developed for the Information Visualizer: 1) the Spiral Calendar was designed for rapid access to an individual's daily schedule, and 2) the Time Lattice was designed for analyzing the time relationships among the schedules of groups of people. The Spiral Calendar embodies a new 3D graphics technique for integrating detail and context by placing objects in a 3D spiral. It demonstrates that advanced graphics techniques can enhance routine office information tasks. The Time Lattice is formed by aligning a collection of 2D calendars. 2D translucent shadows provide views and interactive access to the resulting complex 3D object. The paper focuses on how these visualizations were developed. The Spiral Calendar, in particular, has gone through an entire cycle of development, including design, implementation, evaluation, revision and reuse. Our experience should prove useful to others developing user interfaces based on advanced graphics.

In this paper, we describe the YeTi information sharing system that has been designed to foster community building through informal digital content sharing. The YeTi system is a general information parsing, hosting and distribution infrastructure, with interfaces designed for individual and public content reading. In this paper we describe the YeTi public display interface, with a particular focus on tools we have designed to provide lightweight awareness of others' interactions with posted content. Our tools augment content with metadata that reflect people's reading of content - captured video clips of who's reading and interacting with content, tools to allow people to leave explicit freehand annotations about content, and a visualization of the content access history to show when content is interacted with. Results from an initial evaluation are presented and discussed.

The recent trend towards miniaturization of projection technology indicates that handheld devices will soon have the ability to project information onto any surface, thus enabling interfaces that are not possible with current handhelds. We explore the design space of dynamically defining and interacting with multiple virtual information spaces embedded in a physical environment using a handheld projector and a passive pen tracked in 3D. We develop techniques for defining and interacting with these spaces, and explore usage scenarios.

The Galaxy of News system embodies an approach to visualizing large quantities of independently authored pieces of information, in this case news stories. At the heart of this system is a powerful relationship construction engine that constructs an associative relation network to automatically build implicit links between related articles. To visualize these relationships, and hence the news information space, the Galaxy of News uses pyramidal structuring and visual presentation, semantic zooming and panning, animated visual cues that are dynamically constructed to illustrate relationships between articles, and fluid interaction in a three dimensional information space to browse and search through large databases of news articles. The result is a tool that allows people to quickly gain a broad understanding of a news base by providing an abstracted presentation that covers the entire information base, and through interaction, progressively refines the details of the information space. This research has been generalized into a model for news access and visualization to provide automatic construction of news information spaces and derivation of an interactive news experience.

Standard telephone keypads are labeled with letters of the alphabet, enabling users to enter textual data for a variety of possible applications. However, the overloading of three letters on a single key creates a potential ambiguity as to which character was intended, which must be resolved for unambiguous text entry. Existing systems all use pairs of keypresses to spell out single key letters, but are extremely cumbersome and frustrating to use.

Instead, we propose single-stroke text entry on telephone keypads, with the ambiguity resolved by exploiting information-theoretic constraints. We develop algorithms capable of correctly identifying up to 99% of the characters in typical English text, sufficient for such applications as telephones for the hearing impaired, E-mail without a terminal, and advanced voice-response systems.

The Galaxy of News system embodies an approach to visualizing large quantities of independently authored pieces of information, in this case news stories. At the heart of this system is a powerful relationship construction engine that constructs an associative relation network to automatically build implicit links between related articles. To visualize these relationships, and hence the news information space, the Galaxy of News uses pyramidal structuring and visual presentation, semantic zooming and panning, animated visual cues that are dynamically constructed to illustrate relationships between articles, and fluid interaction in a three dimensional information space to browse and search through large databases of news articles. The result is a tool that allows people to quickly gain a broad understanding of a news base by providing an abstracted presentation that covers the entire information base, and through interaction, progressively refines the details of the information space. This research has been generalized into a model for news access and visualization to provide automatic construction of news information spaces and derivation of an interactive news experience.

We present a new focus+context (fisheye) scheme for visualizing and manipulating large hierarchies. The essence of our approach is to lay out the hierarchy uniformly on the hyperbolic plane and map this plane onto a circular display region. The projection onto the disk provides a natural mechanism for assigning more space to a portion of the hierarchy while still embedding it in a much larger context. Change of focus is accomplished by translating the structure on the hyperbolic plane, which allows a smooth transition without compromising the presentation of the context.

We describe the current status of Pad++, a zooming graphical interface that we are exploring as an alternative to traditional window and icon-based approaches to interface design. We discuss the motivation for Pad++, describe the implementation, and present prototype applications. In addition, we introduce an informational physics strategy for interface design and briefly compare it with metaphor-based design strategies.

The increasing mass of information confronting a business or an individual have created a demand for information management applications. Time-based information, in particular, is an important part of many information access tasks. This paper explores how to use 3D graphics and interactive animation to design and implement visualizers that improve access to large masses of time-based information. Two new visualizers have been developed for the Information Visualizer: 1) the Spiral Calendar was designed for rapid access to an individual's daily schedule, and 2) the Time Lattice was designed for analyzing the time relationships among the schedules of groups of people. The Spiral Calendar embodies a new 3D graphics technique for integrating detail and context by placing objects in a 3D spiral. It demonstrates that advanced graphics techniques can enhance routine office information tasks. The Time Lattice is formed by aligning a collection of 2D calendars. 2D translucent shadows provide views and interactive access to the resulting complex 3D object. The paper focuses on how these visualizations were developed. The Spiral Calendar, in particular, has gone through an entire cycle of development, including design, implementation, evaluation, revision and reuse. Our experience should prove useful to others developing user interfaces based on advanced graphics.

Computer sliders are a generic user input mechanism for specifying a numeric value from a range. For data visualization, the effectiveness of sliders may be increased by using the space inside the slider as

• an interactive color scale,

• a barplot for discrete data, and

• a density plot for continuous data.

The idea is to show the selected values in relation to the data and its distribution. Furthermore, the selection mechanism may be generalized using a painting metaphor to specify arbitrary, disconnected intervals while maintaining an intuitive user-interface.

Many on-line interaction environments have a large number of users. It is difficult for the participants, especially new ones, to form a clear mental image about those with whom they are interacting. How can we compactly convey information about these participants to each other? We propose the data portrait, a novel graphical representation of users based on their past interactions. Data portraits can inform users about each other and the overall social environment. We use a flower metaphor for creating individual data portraits, and a garden metaphor for combining these portraits to represent an on-line environment. We will review previous work in visualizing both individuals and groups. We will then describe our visualizations, explain how to create them, and show how they can be used to address user questions.

This paper describes the concept of Time-Machine Computing (TMC), a time-centric approach to organizing information on computers. A system based on Time-Machine Computing allows a user to visit the past and the future states of computers. When a user needs to refer to a document that he/she was working on at some other time, he/she can travel in the time dimension and the system restores the computer state at that time. Since the user's activities on the system are automatically archived, the user's daily workspace is seamlessly integrated into the information archive. The combination of spatial information management of the desktop metaphor and time traveling allows a user to organize and archive information without being bothered by folder hierarchies or the file classification problems that are common in today's desktop environments. TMC also provides a mechanism for linking multiple applications and external information sources by exchanging time information. This paper describes the key features of TMC, a time-machine desktop environment called “TimeScape,” and several time-oriented application integration examples.

In this paper we introduce multidimensional visualization and interaction techniques that are an extension to related work in parallel histograms and dynamic querying. Bargrams are, in effect, histograms whose bars have been tipped over and lined up end-to-end. We discuss affordances of parallel bargrams in the context of systems that support consumer-based information exploration and choice based on the attributes of the items in the choice set. Our tool called EZChooser has enabled a number of prototypes in such domains as Internet shopping, investment decisions, college choice, and so on, and a limited version has been deployed for car shopping. Evaluations of the techniques include an experiment indicating that trained users prefer EZChooser over static tables for choice tasks among sets of 50 items with 7-9 attributes.

Making effective use of the available display space has long been a fundamental issue in user interface design. We live in a time of rapid advances in available CPU power and memory. However, the common sizes of our computational display spaces have only minimally increased or in some cases, such as hand held devices, actually decreased. In addition, the size and scope of the information spaces we wish to explore are also expanding. Representing vast amounts of information on our relatively small screens has become increasingly problematic and has been associated with problems in navigation, interpretation and recognition. User interface research has proposed several differing presentation approaches to address these problems. These methods create displays that vary considerably, visually and algorithmically. We present a unified framework that provides a way of relating seemingly distinct methods, facilitating the inclusion of more than one presentation method in a single interface. Furthermore, it supports extrapolation between the presentation methods it describes. Of particular interest are the presentation possibilities that exist in the ranges between various distortion presentations, magnified insets and detail-in-context presentations, and between detail-in-context presentations and a full-zooming environment. This unified framework offers a geometric presentation library in which presentation variations are available independently of the mode of graphic representation. The intention is to promote the ease of exploration and experimentation into the use of varied presentation combinations.

This paper describes the VITE system, a visual workspace that supports two-way mapping for projecting structured information to a two-dimensional workspace and updating the structured information based on user interactions in the workspace. This is related to information visualization, but reflecting visual edits in the structured data requires a two-way mapping from data to visualization and from visualization to data. VITE provides users with an interface for designing two-way mappings. Mappings are reusable on different datasets and may be switched within a task. An evaluation of VITE was conducted to study how people use two-way mapping and how two-way mapping can help in problem solving tasks. The results show that users could quickly design visual mappings to help their problem-solving tasks. Users developed more sophisticated strategies for visual problem-solving over time.

Today's generic data management applications such as accounting, CRM or logging and tracking software, rely on form and menu based interfaces. These applications take only marginal advantage of current graphical user interfaces. This is because the data they handle does not have intrinsic visual representations upon which direct manipulation principles can be used. This article presents how we have extended an Information Visualization framework with generic data manipulation functions. These new data editing capabilities are tuned to take advantage of the characteristics of each view. They enable us to generalize the direct manipulation mechanisms to address many abstract data manipulation needs. In this article we present five uses of the features we have implemented and deduce a general workflow applicable to a variety of contexts. The workflow comprises three steps and five editing actions. The steps are: adjust view, select, and edit. The editing actions are: edit a value or group of values, clone objects, remove objects, add attributes, and remove attributes. The workflow provides complete editing access to table and hierarchical data structures using particularly terse interaction methods. It defines a general data editing model that enables powerful data manipulation tasks without requiring end-user programming or scripting.

Many tasks require users to extract information from diverse sources, to edit or process this information locally, and to explore how the end results are affected by changes in the information or in its processing. We present the RecipeSheet, a general-purpose tool for assisting users in such tasks. The RecipeSheet lets users create information processors, called recipes, which may take input in a variety of forms such as text, Web pages, or XML, and produce results in a similar variety of forms. The processing carried out by a recipe may be specified using a macro or query language, of which we currently support Rexx, Smalltalk and XQuery, or by capturing the behaviour of a Web application or Web service. In the RecipeSheet's spreadsheet-inspired user interface, information appears in cells, with inter-cell dependencies defined by recipes rather than formulas. Users can also intervene manually to control which information flows through the dependency connections. Through a series of examples we illustrate how tasks that would be challenging in existing environments are supported by the RecipeSheet.

Sometimes users fail to notice a change that just took place on their display. For example, the user may have accidentally deleted an icon or a remote collaborator may have changed settings in a control panel. Animated transitions can help, but they force users to wait for the animation to complete. This can be cumbersome, especially in situations where users did not need an explanation. We propose a different approach. Phosphor objects show the outcome of their transition instantly; at the same time they explain their change in retrospect. Manipulating a phosphor slider, for example, leaves an afterglow that illustrates how the knob moved. The parallelism of instant outcome and explanation supports both types of users. Users who already understood the transition can continue interacting without delay, while those who are inexperienced or may have been distracted can take time to view the effects at their own pace. We present a framework of transition designs for widgets, icons, and objects in drawing programs. We evaluate phosphor objects in two user studies and report significant performance benefits for phosphor objects.

Temporal events, while often discrete, also have interesting relationships within and across times: larger events are often collections of smaller more discrete events (battles within wars; artists' works within a form); events at one point also have correlations with events at other points (a play written in one period is related to its performance over a period of time). Most temporal visualisations, however, only represent discrete data points or single data types along a single timeline: this event started here and ended there; this work was published at this time; this tag was popular for this period. In order to represent richer, faceted attributes of temporal events, we present Continuum. Continuum enables hierarchical relationships in temporal data to be represented and explored; it enables relationships between events across periods to be expressed, and in particular it enables user-determined control over the level of detail of any facet of interest so that the person using the system can determine a focus point, no matter the level of zoom over the temporal space. We present the factors motivating our approach, our evaluation and implementation of this new visualisation which makes it easy for anyone to apply this interface to rich, large-scale datasets with temporal data.

This paper describes the VITE system, a visual workspace that supports two-way mapping for projecting structured information to a two-dimensional workspace and updating the structured information based on user interactions in the workspace. This is related to information visualization, but reflecting visual edits in the structured data requires a two-way mapping from data to visualization and from visualization to data. VITE provides users with an interface for designing two-way mappings. Mappings are reusable on different datasets and may be switched within a task. An evaluation of VITE was conducted to study how people use two-way mapping and how two-way mapping can help in problem solving tasks. The results show that users could quickly design visual mappings to help their problem-solving tasks. Users developed more sophisticated strategies for visual problem-solving over time.

In this paper, we describe a multimodal interface prototype system based on Dynamical Dialogue Model. This system not only integrates information of speech and gestures, but also controls the response timing in order to realize a smooth interaction between user and computer. Our approach consists of human-human dialogue analysis, and computational modeling of dialogue.

Many tasks require users to extract information from diverse sources, to edit or process this information locally, and to explore how the end results are affected by changes in the information or in its processing. We present the RecipeSheet, a general-purpose tool for assisting users in such tasks. The RecipeSheet lets users create information processors, called recipes, which may take input in a variety of forms such as text, Web pages, or XML, and produce results in a similar variety of forms. The processing carried out by a recipe may be specified using a macro or query language, of which we currently support Rexx, Smalltalk and XQuery, or by capturing the behaviour of a Web application or Web service. In the RecipeSheet's spreadsheet-inspired user interface, information appears in cells, with inter-cell dependencies defined by recipes rather than formulas. Users can also intervene manually to control which information flows through the dependency connections. Through a series of examples we illustrate how tasks that would be challenging in existing environments are supported by the RecipeSheet.

Webmail clients provide millions of end users with convenient and ubiquitous access to electronic mail - the most successful collaboration tool ever. Web email clients are also the platform of choice for recent innovations on electronic mail and for integration of related information services into email. In the enterprise, however, webmail applications have been relegated to being a supplemental tool for mail access from home or while on the road. In this paper, we draw on recent research in the area of electronic mail to understand usage models and performance requirements for enterprise email applications. We then present an innovative architecture for a webmail client. By leveraging recent advances in web browser technology, we show that webmail clients can offer performance and responsiveness that rivals a desktop application while still retaining all the advantages of a browser based client.

Information cannot be found if it is not recorded. Existing rich graphical application approaches interfere with user input in many ways, forcing complex interactions to enter simple information, requiring complex cognition to decide where the data should be stored, and limiting the kind of information that can be entered to what can fit into specific applications' data models. Freeform text entry suffers from none of these limitations but produces data that is hard to retrieve or visualize. We describe the design and implementation of Jourknow, a system that aims to bridge these two modalities, supporting lightweight text entry and weightless context capture that produces enough structure to support rich interactive presentation and retrieval of the arbitrary information entered.

The Galaxy of News system embodies an approach to visualizing large quantities of independently authored pieces of information, in this case news stories. At the heart of this system is a powerful relationship construction engine that constructs an associative relation network to automatically build implicit links between related articles. To visualize these relationships, and hence the news information space, the Galaxy of News uses pyramidal structuring and visual presentation, semantic zooming and panning, animated visual cues that are dynamically constructed to illustrate relationships between articles, and fluid interaction in a three dimensional information space to browse and search through large databases of news articles. The result is a tool that allows people to quickly gain a broad understanding of a news base by providing an abstracted presentation that covers the entire information base, and through interaction, progressively refines the details of the information space. This research has been generalized into a model for news access and visualization to provide automatic construction of news information spaces and derivation of an interactive news experience.

Information cannot be found if it is not recorded. Existing rich graphical application approaches interfere with user input in many ways, forcing complex interactions to enter simple information, requiring complex cognition to decide where the data should be stored, and limiting the kind of information that can be entered to what can fit into specific applications' data models. Freeform text entry suffers from none of these limitations but produces data that is hard to retrieve or visualize. We describe the design and implementation of Jourknow, a system that aims to bridge these two modalities, supporting lightweight text entry and weightless context capture that produces enough structure to support rich interactive presentation and retrieval of the arbitrary information entered.