Interfacing information in affective user studies

Abstract

In affective user studies, visual interfacing of data has received little attention. Such interfaces can support qualitative understanding, conveying insight about static and temporally evolving information; static information is exemplified by demographic data, while temporally evolving information is exemplified by physiological signals. In this paper we present User Portrait -an abstraction and visualization method that condenses the essence of a study's data in a single figure. It is an inverted pyramid design, where the information abstraction is communicated on the top view, while the details are displayed on a need-to-know basis. The method has been applied to a longitudinal study of student affect vs. exam performance, effectively visualizing its voluminous data set.