VizEval: An Experimental System for the Study of Program Visualization Quality

Author

Rhodes, Philippa ; Kraemer, Eileen ; Hamilton-Taylor, Ashley ; Thomas, Sujith ; Ross, Matthew ; Davis, Elizabeth ; Hailston, Kenneth ; Main, Keith

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Georgia Univ., Athens, GA

fYear

2006

fDate

4-8 Sept. 2006

Firstpage

55

Lastpage

58

Abstract

The VizEval Suite is an environment designed to support experimentation with and evaluation of program visualization attributes that affect the user´s ability to grasp essential concepts. In this paper, we describe the VizEval Suite and an initial experiment conducted both as a test-bed of the VizEval Suite and to study how perceptual/cognitive characteristics of the visualization affect the users´ understanding of the program visualization. VizEval is designed to simplify the creation and analysis of such studies. Our experimental results show that some perceptual/cognitive characteristics that help one task (e.g., detection of critical information) may harm another (e.g., localization of critical items), and vice versa. The VizEval software is available for download at http://www.cs.uga.edu/~eileen/VizEval/

Keywords

program visualisation; programming environments; VizEval Suite; program visualization quality; visualization cognition; visualization perception; Animation; Bars; Computer science; Computer science education; Data structures; Data visualization; Humans; Programming profession; Psychology; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, 2006. VL/HCC 2006. IEEE Symposium on

Conference_Location

Brighton

Print_ISBN

0-7695-2586-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/VLHCC.2006.57

Filename

1698762