Using games to investigate movement for graph comprehension

We describe the results of empirical investigations that explore the effectiveness of moving graph diagrams to improve the comprehension of their structure. The investigations involved subjects playing a game that required understanding the structure of a number of graphs. The use of a game as the task was intended to motivate the exploration of the graph by the subjects. The results show that movement can be beneficial when there is nodenode or node-edge occlusion in the graph diagram but can have a detrimental effect when there is no occlusion, particularly if the diagram is small. We believe the positive result should generalise to other graph exploration tasks, and that graph movement is likely be useful as an additional graph exploration tool. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.3.6 [Computer Graphics] Methodology and Techniques

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: AVI
• Authors: John Bovey, Florence Benoy, Peter Rodgers
• Keywords: AVI 2004, Graph Diagram, Graph Exploration, Graph Movement, Software Engineering