Visual Analytics on Large Displays: Exploring User Spatialization and How Size and Resolution Affect Task Performance

Large, high-resolution displays (LHRDs) have been shown to enable increased productivity over conventional monitors. Previous work has identified the benefits of LHRDs for Visual Analytics tasks, where the user is analyzing complex data sets. However, LHRDs are fundamentally different from desktop and mobile computing environments, presenting some unique usability challenges and opportunities, and need to be better understood. There is thus a need for additional studies to analyze the impact of LHRD size and display resolution on content spatialization strategies and Visual Analytics task performance. We present the results of two studies of the effects of physical display size and resolution on analytical task successes and also analyze how participants spatially cluster visual content in different display conditions. Overall, we found that navigation technique preferences differ significantly among users, that the wide range of observed spatialization types suggest several different analysis techniques are adopted, and that display size affects clustering task performance whereas display resolution does not.