Towards the Understanding of Interaction in Information Visualization

Over the past few years the web has been responsible for the rise in popularity of visualizations and it seems that interactive or playable visualizations have become more popular and end up standing out more. The use of interactivity and animation has been extensively discussed in information visualization research, but there has been some controversy in relation to its benefits. Additionally, there is still little empirical evidence about its efficacy in terms of improving understanding of the data and there is few research that points out guidelines of how to incorporate it successfully and that proves that playable visualizations are indeed more enjoyable and popular among users. In order to guide future research on the actual benefits of interactivity in visualization it is important to understand what types of interactivity are currently being used in the field and to have a framework to help discuss and evaluate interaction techniques. After conducting an extensive review of popular visualizations and their interactive capabilities, we propose eleven categories of interaction techniques: filtering, selecting, abstract/elaborate, overview and explore, connect/relate, history, extraction of features, reconfigure, encode, participation/collaboration, and gamification.