Transcript Robertson, Bederson, Card

Information Workspaces
Hilary Browne and Jeff Carver
November 16, 1999
Information Workspaces
• Intermediary place for info from
infosphere
• Goal to arrange information to
decrease cost for completing tasks
• Degree of interest based on locality
of reference
– More frequently used information is
faster to locate
Information Visualization
Using 3D Interactive
Animation
Robertson, Card, and Mackinlay
Goals of Info Visualizer
• Use graphics to lower cost of:
– finding information
– accessing information
• Augment traditional IR goals of
precision and recall
– reduce time-cost of finding info
– increase amount of info user can handle
Solution
• Make workspace larger - rooms
• Delegate work to agents - search
• Use natural human interaction rates cognitive coprocessor
• Visualizations to use perceptual skills
- cone tree, perspective wall
Cone Trees
• 3D technique for viewing hierarchical
data
• Animated context preserving
browsing
– rotation
• Reduces occlusion with transparency
• Handle wide aspect ratios
Perspective Wall
• 3D technique for viewing linear data
• Focus+Context fisheye visualization
• Animated context preserving
browsing
– smooth scrolling
– stretching
Strengths and Weaknesses
• Strengths
– Only need mouse and keyboard
– Multiple visualization techniques
• Weaknesses
– Complicated to construct
– Cone Trees - occlusion, wasted space
– Perspective wall - fisheye distortion
Favorite Sentence
• “…we believe that the structure of
information, the emerging
technologies of 3D and interactive
animation, and the human perceptual
system can be effectively exploited
to improve management of and access
to large information spaces.”
The WebBook and the
WebForager: An
Information Workspace for
the World-Wide Web
Card, Robertson, York
Problems
• One unit of interaction - page
• Difficult to group pages for
sensemaking tasks
• Uniform, slow cost structure for page
access
Solutions
• WebBook
– Group logically connected pages
– Multiple viewing techniques
• WebForager
– Virtual 3D workspace with 3-tiered cost
structure
• focus, immediate memory, tertiary storage
– Cost structure is tunable to user’s needs
Strengths and Weaknesses
• Strengths
– Useful application of 2 common
metaphors
• Weaknesses
– Cost function relies on static pages
– Occlusion
– Side by side comparisions
Favorite Sentence
• “Just as animals forage for food and
try to optimize their food rate of
gain, users often seek strategies to
optimize their information gain per
unit time…”