Facilitating Exploration with Interaction Snapshots under High Latency

TL;DR

This paper introduces interaction snapshots, a user experience design that allows users to interact with large datasets asynchronously during high latency, improving usability without requiring backend changes.

Contribution

It proposes a novel UX approach using interaction snapshots to mitigate high latency issues without complex backend modifications.

Findings

Participants completed data analysis tasks with minimal negative impact up to 5 seconds latency.

Interaction snapshots enabled users to navigate and interact without waiting for each response.

User study confirmed the effectiveness of snapshots in high latency scenarios.

Abstract

Latency is, unfortunately, a reality when working with large datasets. Guaranteeing imperceptible latency for interactivity is often prohibitively expensive: the application developer may be forced to migrate data processing engines or deal with complex error bounds on samples, and to limit the application to users with high network bandwidth. Instead of relying on the backend, we propose a simple UX design---interaction snapshots. Responses of requests from the interactions are asynchronously loaded in "snapshots". With interaction snapshots, users can interact concurrently while the snapshots load. Our user study participants found it useful not to have to wait for each result and easily navigate to prior snapshots. For latency up to 5 seconds, participants were able to complete extrema, threshold, and trend identification tasks with little negative impact.