Assessing end-user interaction for multi-criteria local search with heatmap and icon-based visualizations

Authors:
Chandan Kumar;Benjamin Poppinga;Daniel Haeuser;Wilko Heuten;Susanne Boll
Affiliations:
University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany;OFFIS - Institute for Information Technology, Oldenburg, Germany;University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany;OFFIS - Institute for Information Technology, Oldenburg, Germany;University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany
Venue:
Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on MapInteraction
Year:
2013

Citing 9
Cited 0

Methods to support human-centred design

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Informed spatial decisions through coordinated views

Information Visualization - Special issue on coordinated and multiple views in exploratory visualization
Hotmap: Looking at Geographic Attention

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Spatial ordered weighted averaging: incorporating spatially variable attitude towards risk in spatial multi-criteria decision-making

Environmental Modelling & Software
Evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of visual variables for geographic information visualization

COSIT'09 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Spatial information theory
D3 Data-Driven Documents

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
The spatial dimensions of multi-criteria evaluation – case study of a home buyer's spatial decision support system

GIScience'06 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Geographic Information Science
Geovisual interfaces to find suitable urban regions for citizens: a user-centered requirement study

Proceedings of the 2013 ACM conference on Pervasive and ubiquitous computing adjunct publication
Survey of methods to visualize alternatives in multiple criteria decision making problems

OR Spectrum

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Nowadays local search services are essential to provide access to geographic entities and to satisfy users' spatial information needs. While the users of these services can look for the entities of interest on map interface via sequential search or browsing of individual categories, the visualization of multiple categories simultaneously is still not well supported. This limits the end users on abstracted view, exploration, and comparison of spatial areas with respect to multiple criteria of interests. In this research we investigate the end-user interaction for multi-criteria local search with two popular representations such as aggregated pixel and icon based visualizations. We present a grid-based interactive interface where users can select multiple criteria of interests and explore the relevant spatial regions via aggregated heatmap visualizations. We evaluate the design against icon/marker based visualization, which is an easy adaption of current commercial local search interfaces. We found that heatgrid visualization for local search performs as good as the more popular marker based interface. We report our findings on both visualizations regarding several user-centered aspects such as exploration ability, information overload and cognitive demand.