Evaluating a fisheye view of source code

Jakobsen, Mikkel R.; Hornbæk, Kasper

doi:10.1145/1124772.1124830

Cited by 24 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…We suggest making the context region of the interfaces more informative by including more readable or otherwise useful information. Our multifocus menu is one example, while the interface presented by Jakobsen and Hornbaek [2006] is another.…”

Section: General Implications For Fisheye Interfacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untangling the usability of fisheye menus

Hornbæk

Hertzum

2007

ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.

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Fisheye menus have become a prominent example of fisheye interfaces, yet contain several nonfisheye elements and have not been systematically evaluated. This study investigates whether fisheye menus are useful, and tries to untangle the impact on usability of the following properties of fisheye menus: use of distortion, index of letters for coarse navigation, and the focus-lock mode for accurate movement. Twelve participants took part in an experiment comparing fisheye menus with three alternative menu designs across known-item and browsing tasks, as well as across alphabetical and categorical menu structures. The results show that for finding known items, conventional hierarchical menus are the most accurate and by far the fastest. In addition, participants rate the hierarchical menu as more satisfying than fisheye and multifocus menus, but do not consistently prefer any one menu. For browsing tasks, the menus neither differ with respect to accuracy nor selection time. Eye-movement data show that participants make little use of nonfocus regions of the fisheye menu, though these are a defining feature of fisheye interfaces. Nonfocus regions are used more with the multifocus menu, which enlarges important menu items in these regions. With the hierarchical menu, participants make shorter fixations and have shorter scanpaths, suggesting lower requirements for mental activity and visual search. We conclude by discussing why fisheye menus are inferior to the hierarchical menu and how both may be improved.

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Section: General Implications For Fisheye Interfacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untangling the usability of fisheye menus

Hornbæk

Hertzum

2007

ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.

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“…A number of approaches have been suggested for wholeprogram visualization and navigation [4,7,12,18,40]. Some approaches have made efforts to restrict the information presented so as not to overwhelm the developer by adding zooming or fisheye viewing capabilities [7,18,40] or aggregating dependencies to a higher level [4].…”

Section: Program Structure Visualizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the neighborhood with dora to expedite software maintenance

Hill

Pollock

Vijay‐Shanker

2007

Proceedings of the Twenty-Second IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

102

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Completing software maintenance and evolution tasks for today's large, complex software systems can be difficult, often requiring considerable time to understand the system well enough to make correct changes. Despite evidence that successful programmers use program structure as well as identifier names to explore software, most existing program exploration techniques use either structural or lexical identifier information. By using only one type of information, automated tools ignore valuable clues about a developer's intentions-clues critical to the human program comprehension process. In this paper, we present and evaluate a technique that exploits both program structure and lexical information to help programmers more effectively explore programs. Our approach uses structural information to focus automated program exploration and lexical information to prune irrelevant structure edges from consideration. For the important program exploration step of expanding from a seed, our experimental results demonstrate that an integrated lexical-and structural-based approach is significantly more effective than a state-of-the-art structural program exploration technique.

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“…However, only five of the 19 studies reported usage patterns, constructed either based on non-intrusively collected interactivity recordings such as eye-tracking records [21,16] or navigation action logs [13,15,17].…”

Section: Capture Usage Patternsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increasing the utility of quantitative empirical studies for meta-analysis

Lam

Munzner

2008

Proceedings of the 2008 Workshop on BEyond Time and Errors: Novel evaLuation Methods for Information Visualization

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Despite the long history and consistent use of quantitative empirical methods to evaluate information visualization techniques and systems, our understanding of interface use remains incomplete. While there are inherent limitations to the method, such as the choice of task and data, we believe the utility of study results can be enhanced if they were amenable to meta-analysis. Based on our experience in extracting design guidelines from existing quantitative studies, we recommend improvements to both study design and reporting to promote meta-analysis: (1) Use comparable interfaces in terms of visual elements, information content and amount displayed, levels of data organization displayed, and interaction complexity; (2) Capture usage patterns in addition to overall performance measurements to better identify design tradeoffs; (3) Isolate and study interface factors instead of overall interface performance; and (4) Report more study details, either within the publications, or as supplementary materials.

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Evaluating a fisheye view of source code

Cited by 24 publications

References 20 publications

Untangling the usability of fisheye menus

Untangling the usability of fisheye menus

Exploring the neighborhood with dora to expedite software maintenance

Increasing the utility of quantitative empirical studies for meta-analysis

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