The Effect of Animated Transitions on User Navigation in 3D Tree-Maps

Abstract

This paper describes a user study conducted to evaluate the use of smooth animated transitions between directories in a three-dimensional, tree-map visualization. We looked specifically at the task of returning to a previously visited directory after either an animated or instantaneous return to the root location. The results of the study show that animation is a double-edged sword. Even though users take more shortcuts, they also make more severe navigational errors. It seems as though the promise of a more direct route to the target directory, which animation provides, somehow precludes users who navigate incorrectly from applying a successful recovery strategy.

Animated Transitions for Adaptive Small Size Mobile Menus

“…One-second animations worked as well as three-second ones. This is in agreement with the menu transitions study of Bladh et al [2].…”

“…In the research by Bladh et al it has been found that short animations during navigation with 3D maps affect user performance and reduce task times when e.g. counting details on maps [2]. Klein & Bederson measured better results in reading when scrolling animation was used [3].…”

Progressive Presentation of Large Hierarchies Using Treemaps

“…The traditional slice-and-dice approach [1] has been enhanced by squarified [5], ordered [5], Voronoi [6], or generalized layouts [4]. There are also radial layouts [7] and different three-dimensional approaches [8]. Cascaded treemaps [9] have been developed to emphasize containment within tree structure, but at the cost of space.…”

Circular partitions with applications to visualization and embeddings

“…Extensions of Treemap for visualization in 3-dimensional space have been considered by Rekimoto and Green [25], Bladh et al [9], and Bladh et al [8]. A variant of Treemap that constructs radial partitions was proposed by Stasko et al [29].…”