Presentation of Choosel ( code.google.com/p/choosel/ ) in the VisID lab at the University of Victoria. Choosel is a web-based environment that aims at facilitating flexible visual data exploration for information visualization novices.

1. CHOOSEL
A WEB-BASED ENVIRONMENT
FOR ENTRY-LEVEL VISUAL DATA ANALYSIS
Lars Grammel,
01-Sep-2010 CHISEL Group, University of Victoria

2. Goal
2
Provide a Flexible and Intuitive
Visual Data Analysis Environment
for InfoVis Novices

3. 3
Video

4. Features
4
 Several visualizations types
 charts, graph, timeline, map, tag cloud
 Multiple views
 View coordination using drag & drop
 Drop target highlighting & previews
 Highlighting of items across multiple views
 Custom sets that act as selections
 Filtered views & synchronized selection
 Workspace persistence & sharing
 Undo / redo

5. Design Constraints
5
 Small data sets (up to 5000 items)
 Heterogeneous data
 Web-based environment
 Reuse third party visualization components
 Multiple coordinated views
 Tight integration of visualization construction and
data analysis

6. Design Choices
6
 Written in GWT (Java to JavaScript compilation)
 Need to integrate different components (e.g. Flash,
JavaScript)
 Author is familiar with Java
 Better tool support (unit testing, debugging,
refactoring)
 Deployed on Google App Engine (but this is not
required)
 Applications tailor Choosel Framework to domain

7. Architecture
7
Choosel Client (in Browser)
View Coordination Google Maps
Help and Branding
Flexvis
Undo / Redo
Server Management Views Simile Timeline
Workspace Persistence & Workspace
Sharing Management Protovis Charts
Data Access Data Management Tag Cloud

8. Choosel Applications
8
 Bio-Mixer
 Biomedical Ontology Exploration
 Work Item Explorer
 IBM Jazz Issue Tracking Data
Choosel is open source! http://code.google.com/p/choosel/

9. 9
Demo

10. Usability Study
10
Does our interaction approach work in practice? What
usability issues are hampering the interactions?
Laboratory User Study with 8 Participants (& 1 Pilot)
 Video Tutorial
 Spatio-temporal analysis (2 Tasks)
 Earthquakes & Tsunami Warnings
 Concept analysis (4 tasks)
 Biomedical Ontology Data
 Evaluation Questionnaire
 Ratings, Open Questions

11. Reactions
11
“Visually pleasing to the eye. Very intuitive in that for the most
part it made sense what each window did in terms of function.
The possibilities of what one can produce with this easy
interface seem enormous.” P7
“[I liked that] everything is connected and interactive.” P9
“It is hard to understand what some of the function does.” P3

12. Task Completion
12
Spatio-Temporal Tasks Concept Tasks on Biomedical Data
P2 f-ps f-ps f-s f-s a n-a
P3 f-ps f-ps f-s f-s f-ps n-a
P4 f-s f-ps f-s f-s n-a n-a
P5 f-s f-s f-s f-s f-ps n-a
P6 f-ps f-ps f-s f-s f-ps a
P7 f-s f-ps f-s f-ps f-ps f-s
P8 f-ps f-ps f-s f-s f-ps n-a
P9 f-ps f-s f-s f-s f-s f-s
1 2 1 2 3 4
f-s: finished, succeeded f-ps: finished, partially succeeded a: attempted n-a: not attempted

13. Usability/Usefulness of Features
13

14. Multiple Windows
14
“I liked being able to view the
timeline and the map at the
same time when exploring
earthquake data.” P5
“Resizing windows was annoying
especially since there is a lot of
space on the screen that I felt
was not used because the
default window size is small.” P5
63% of the participants resized
and moved windows frequently.

15. Drag and Drop
15
“When dragging it was very
helpful to see where you can
drag the item to (by lighting up
the possible windows).” P2
“The drag and drop […] had what
you needed right there. At first
glance everything seemed
easier, but as you get deeper
into the tasks I got confused on
how things actually worked.” P7

16. Highlighting of Items and Sets
16
“The use of selections and
highlighting in the different
windows is very helpful to
organize what one is
doing.” P2

17. Custom Sets
17
“I liked the fact that I could easily
look for a specific earthquake
set.” P4
“I could not use a lasso function to
quickly highlight multiple items
in any view.” P5

18. Current & Future Work
18
 More Visualizations
 Visualization Configuration
 Automatic Visualization
 Faceted Navigation

19. Thank you!
19
Choosel is open source!
http://code.google.com/p/choosel/
Lars Grammel
CHISEL Group, University of Victoria
Lars.Grammel@gmail.com