Pedagogy and usability in interactive algorithm visualizations: Designing and evaluating CIspace

Pedagogy and usability in interactive algorithm visualizations: Designing and evaluating CIspace

Interactive algorithm visualizations (AVs) are powerful tools for teaching and learning concepts that are difficult to describe with static media alone. However, while countless AVs exist, their widespread adoption by the academic community has not occurred due to usability problems and mixed results of pedagogical effectiveness reported in the AV and education literature. This paper presents o...

Designing Effective Algorithm Visualizations

Designing Educationally Effective Algorithm Visualizations

Despite the intuitively compelling adage " a picture is worth a thousand words, " attempts over the past decade to use animations to explain algorithms to students have produced disappointing results. In most cases interesting algorithm animations were designed, but no formal, systematic evaluations were conducted. When such evaluations were performed the results were mixed, with compelling evi...

Using Gaze Data in Evaluating Interactive Visualizations

Evaluations have long been missing or imperfect in a publication presenting a new visualization technique, but proper evaluations are now becoming a standard. There are many reasons for the reluctance of evaluating visualization techniques, including the complexity of the task and the amount of work required. We propose a simple evaluation approach that consists of a set of tasks carried out in...

VisUnit: Evaluating Interactive Graph Visualizations Using Crowdsourcing

The process of evaluating visualizations can be time-consuming. Here, we present a design aimed at automating the process of performing quantitative and qualitative evaluations of graph visualizations by leveraging crowdsourcing, and a set of predefined evaluation modules based on a graph task taxonomy. Specifically, we allow designers to quickly set up a user study with representative graph ta...