User Evaluation of Group-in-a-Box Variants

Group-in-a-box (GIB) is a graph-drawing method designed to facilitate the visualization of the group structure of a graph. GIB allows the user to simultaneously view group sizes and inter-and intra-group structures. Several GIB variants have been proposed in the literature; however, their advantages and disadvantages have not been studied from the perspective of human cognition. Therefore, herein, we used eye tracking analysis and user surveys to evaluate the user experience of four GIB variants: Squarified-Treemap GIB(ST-GIB), Croissant-and-Doughnut GIB (CD-GIB), Force-Directed GIB (FD-GIB), and Tree-Reordered GIB (TR-GIB). We found some trade-offs among the methods for each type of user task and that FD-GIB and TR-GIB are superior than the other variants. Although ST-GIB's results were good, links were difficult to read in this graph layout. Eye-tracking data was gathered to determine which elements in each visualization significantly affected user experience. The results of this study will promote the effective use of GIB to analyze networks such as social networks or web graphs.