Interactive Map Visualizations for Group Planning
Chris Chan, Angela Kessell, Doantam Phan, and Ron Yeh
Motivation
Current groupware calendar systems rely on interfaces that do not exploit human spatial cognitive abilities. As peoplebecome busier and more mobile, methods for making their daily lives (and social lives) more efficient (and fun) would be useful and highly appreciated. One specific example of a user need would be a situation where two small groups of friends want to schedule a day touring Paris. Both groups want to see different sights, but want to meet up in the afternoon sometime, somewhere, to grab lunch. A second example might be a director who needs to schedule simultaneous activities in an amusement park, but needs to ensure that there are no bottlenecks when crowds of people move from one event to another.Solving these types of spatial problems by leveraging interactive visualizations is gaining public interest. For example, the NIH/NSF has placed a priority on furthering the science of visualization of temporal and geospatial information.Furthermore, people are beginning to use mobile phones for location-sensitive queries and planning. Thus, interactive map-based visualization and planning is an important domain to be explored.
Target Users
We are targeting people who needto keep track, reason about, or make predictions of people and events through space and time.One specific user group might be people (not necessarily friends) who are setting up a book club meeting. With a quick glance at people’s locations over the week, one can decide the best day, time, and place to meet up.
Goals for the User Interface
The system will createspatiotemporal visualizations of people’sschedules. The system will link to other people’s schedules, and will also be directly editable. The interface, for instance, could overlay a graphical representation of several schedules on a map of the Stanford campus. This visualization will enable users to quickly make decisions about their own and others’ schedules. For example, Jill can see:
1Ifher daily schedule is optimized for time and distance traveled.
2Ifshe will likely cross paths with a friend (or foe).
3Whether or not others share similar daily schedules with her. For example:
aBoth she and Joe like to go to the CoHo in the afternoon to study.
bFred also makes a loop around Campus Drive in the morning, so perhaps they could become jogging buddies.
cSally also goes from Rains to Roble Gymon Tuesday evenings(via the street, not cutting through campus as she might on foot), so perhaps she could give Jill a ride.
4When she may share free time with other people.
5Whether certain routes are likely to be high-traffic at certain times (e.g.,Jill feels like being alone with her thoughts tonight, so she’ll take an alternate route home).
The interface will display time data at different granularities (days, hours, minutes, or seconds) depending on user preferences.The interface should be interactive—users should be allowed to pan and zoom on the map, and specify which persons’ schedules to display. Users can aggregate schedules across individuals, across time, or across space.
Evaluation
For the first-use study, we will draw participants from the CS147 subject pool, or find other Stanford students (we will compensate each person with a gift certificate).We will evaluate the interface with both quantitative and qualitative measures.
We will create several variants of the interface, populated with either simulated or real data (to be determined depending on time constraints). We will then ask participants to make inferences based on the visualization of the data. We could compare how many correct/incorrect inferences people make, depending on which version of the interface they use. Depending on how many users we can run through the study, we can either choose a between-subjects or within-subjects design. Alternatively, we may give users a task to accomplish, and evaluate their performance on the task (e.g., draw conclusions based on the informationcontained in the visualization).We will also use a questionnaireand debriefing interview to get feedback on their impressions of what worked, what did not, and what features they would like to add to the system.
Figure 1. One possible visualization of people’s schedules over a several-hour span.