Wellmatchedness in Euler Diagrams
Mithileysh Sathiyanarayanan, Tobias Mulling · 2016
Euler diagrams are an important tool in the field of information visualisationand knowledge discovery which are used for visualising set-based information. From the previous papers, Euler diagrams can be effectively used when some of the non wellformedness(diagrams' syntactic relationship rules) are avoided, as they are considered to reduce user comprehension. Though there are empirical studies on wellformedness but there is no study considering wellmatchedness (diagrams' syntactic relationships to be reflected in the semantic relationships). So, in this paper we considered two main wellmatchedness principles (extra zones and duplicated curves) to test which among the two can be relaxed while generating Euler diagrams in the most effective way. In the field of visualisation and human-- computer interaction (HCI), we observe the ways in which humans (users) interact with the visual representations using computers and design technologies. So, the user-study isbased on the task performance (accuracy and response time), preference and eye movements of the participants. Ten participants took part in the study (eighteen diagrams were presented) and the results show that, duplicated curves slows down and trigger extra eye movements, causing delays for the tasks. The other results we obtained from the task performance and preference also helped us build a prototype visualisation tool to generate set-based information (set relationships) using a simulated data. As a contribution to HCI, our results and prototype tool will be useful for algorithm developers and software designers on the optimal way to develop intelligent visualisation tools and aid in generating Euler diagrams using real world data applications.