Abstract:
Visual comparison is an intrinsic part of interactive data exploration and
analysis. The literature provides a large body of existing solutions that
help users accomplish comparison tasks. These solutions are mostly of visual
nature and custom-made for specific data. We ask the question if a more
general support is possible by focusing on the interaction aspect of
comparison tasks. As an answer to this question, we propose a novel
interaction concept that is inspired by real-world behavior of people
comparing information printed on paper. In line with real-world interaction,
our approach supports users (1) in interactively specifying pieces of
graphical information to be compared, (2) in flexibly arranging these pieces
on the screen, and (3) in performing the actual comparison of side-by-side
and overlapping arrangements of the graphical information. Complementary
visual cues and add-ons further assist users in carrying out comparison
tasks. Our concept and the integrated interaction techniques are generally
applicable and can be coupled with different visualization techniques. We
implemented an interactive prototype and conducted a qualitative user study
to assess the concept's usefulness in the context of three different
visualization techniques. The obtained feedback indicates that our
interaction techniques mimic the natural behavior quite well, can be learned
quickly, and are easy to apply to visual comparison tasks.