GuidelineExplorer -- Navigating through the Forrest of Actionable Guidelines on Node-Link Graph Visualization

TL;DR

GuidelineExplorer is an interactive system that organizes and applies actionable guidelines for node-link graph visualizations, helping designers improve visualization decisions and fostering collaboration.

Contribution

This work introduces a structured collection of actionable guidelines for node-link diagrams and presents an interactive tool to facilitate their application in visualization design.

Findings

Structured guidelines improve visualization decision-making.

GuidelineExplorer streamlines applying design guidelines.

The approach is adaptable to graph matrix visualizations.

Abstract

Creating graph visualizations involves many decisions, such as layout, node and edge appearance, and color choices. These decisions are challenging due to the multitude of options available. For instance, graph layout can be force-directed or orthogonal, and edges can be curved, tapered, partially drawn, or animated. Thus, research offers a multitude of guidelines to optimize graph visualizations for human perception and usability. Guidelines can be actionable, providing direct instructions, or non-actionable, specifying what to avoid. This work focuses on actionable guidelines for node-link diagrams, aiding designers in making better decisions. Given the abundance of graph visualization research and the difficulty in navigating it, this work aims to collect and structure actionable guidelines for node-linkvisualizations. To demonstrate the general applicability of our approach to structuring actionable guidelines for node-link diagrams, we also included guidelines for visualizing graphs as matrices. It also proposes a visual interactive system, GuidelineExplorer, to apply guidelines directly to graphs, streamlining the design process and promoting collaboration within the research community.