Toward empirically-based software visualization languages
Douglas, S.; Hundhausen, C.; McKeown, D.
Visual Languages, Proceedings., 11th IEEE International Symposium on
Volume , Issue , 5-9 Sep 1995 Page(s):342 - 349
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/VL.1995.520828
Summary:Underlying any single-user software visualization (SV) system is a
visualization language onto which its users must map the computations
they would like to visualize with the system. We hypothesize that the
usability of such systems turns on their ability to provide an
underlying visualization language that accords with the ways in which
their users conceptualize the computations to be visualized. To explore
the question of how to design visualization languages grounded in human
conceptualization, we present an empirical study that made use of a
research method called visualization storyboarding to investigate the
human conceptualization of the bubblesort algorithm. Using an analytical
framework based on entities, attributes, and transformations, we derive
a semantic-level visualization language for bubblesort, in terms of
which all visualizations observed in our study can be expressed. Our
empirically-based visualization language provides a means for predicting
the usability of the visualization language defined by Lens (Mukherjea
and Stasko, 1994), a prototypical single-user SV system. We draw from a
follow-up usability study of Lens to substantiate our predictions
View citation and abstract |
Cart
