An algorithm for drawing general undirected graphs
Information Processing Letters
Graph drawing by force-directed placement
Software—Practice & Experience
Graph Drawing: Algorithms for the Visualization of Graphs
Graph Drawing: Algorithms for the Visualization of Graphs
Empirical Evaluation of Aesthetics-based Graph Layout
Empirical Software Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Validating Graph Drawing Aesthetics
GD '95 Proceedings of the Symposium on Graph Drawing
Which Aesthetic has the Greatest Effect on Human Understanding?
GD '97 Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Graph Drawing
Cognitive measurements of graph aesthetics
Information Visualization
A Comparison of the Readability of Graphs Using Node-Link and Matrix-Based Representations
INFOVIS '04 Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization
Feature congestion: a measure of display clutter
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
APVis '05 proceedings of the 2005 Asia-Pacific symposium on Information visualisation - Volume 45
Task taxonomy for graph visualization
Proceedings of the 2006 AVI workshop on BEyond time and errors: novel evaluation methods for information visualization
A user study on visualizing directed edges in graphs
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PACIFICVIS '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium
Using the Gestalt Principle of Closure to Alleviate the Edge Crossing Problem in Graph Drawings
IV '11 Proceedings of the 2011 15th International Conference on Information Visualisation
Layout effects on sociogram perception
GD'05 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Graph Drawing
Mad at edge crossings? break the edges!
FUN'12 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Fun with Algorithms
Progress on partial edge drawings
GD'12 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Graph Drawing
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We investigate the readability of node-link diagrams for directed graphs when using partially drawn links instead of showing each link explicitly in its full length. Providing the complete link information between related nodes in a graph can lead to visual clutter caused by many edge crossings. To reduce visual clutter, we draw only partial links. Then, the question arises if such diagrams are still readable, understandable, and interpretable. As a step toward answering this question, we conducted a controlled user experiment with 42 participants to uncover differences in accuracy and completion time for three different tasks: identifying the existence of a direct link, the existence of an indirect connection with one intermediate node, and the node with the largest number of outgoing edges. Furthermore, we compared tapered and traditional edge representations, three different graph sizes, and six different link lengths. In all configurations, the nodes of the graph were placed according to the force-directed layout by Fruchterman and Reingold. One result of this study is that the characteristics of completion times and error rates depend on the type of task. A general observation is that partially drawn links can lead to shorter task completion times, which occurs for nearly all graph sizes, tasks, and both tapered and traditional edge representations. In contrast, there is a tendency toward higher error rates for shorter links, which in fact is task-dependent.