Single View Methods

Selection

This refers to any action that involves the selecting of one or more elements of the visualization. These elements can be items or attributes.

In an interaction, actions cause changes.

Here are the 3 most common selection actions, and the changes they cause:

Action	Change
Click	Highlight
Hover	Show more info
Click+Drag	Apply operation

• Highlighting lets the user see which item has been selected

  

  But, how should the visualization be changed to make the highlighted items clearly visible? Two common strategies include:

  • change the color and/or border of the selected elements

  • grey out (or make transparent) the other (unselected) elements

• Hovering can be used to show more information

  
• A few operations that can be applied upon click+drag include:

  • delete: delete the elements (useful to remove outliers)

  • focus: to focus on certain elements

  • save/label: save or label certain elements that may be important

Navigation

This refers to changing the level of detail and moving the viewpoint.

The most common method for navigation is panning and zooming.

Geometric Zooming: everything scales up or down based on whether one zooms in or out. Semantic Zooming: the type and quantity of information shown changes with the zoom level.

Spatial Arrangement

This type of interaction changes the way in which elements of the visualization are arranged/ordered.

Reordering: This is used commonly, to make visual patterns apparent. For example, bar charts can be reordered in 3 ways: Reordering can be automatic i.e. driven by certain criteria, or manual.

Change Mapping

This interaction changes the way in which the data attributes are mapped to (i.e. encoded with) visual channels.

This could lead to the use of a completely different graph, or a change in the properties of a given graph.

Aggregation

This interaction changes the level of granularity of a given data set. It is related to hierarchical attributes.

This is particularly useful to represent spatial and temporal information, since they often require observing patterns at different resolutions.

Filtering

This interaction allows the viewer to filter data according to some criteria or constraints.

Dynamic Filtering is commonly used. It makes use of UI widgets such as sliders to restrict the range of attributes, thereby modifying the visualization to represent only the data pertaining to the specified range.