Evaluating Effectiveness of Interactivity in Contour-based Geospatial Visualizations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how interactive features in contour-based geospatial visualizations affect user analysis, revealing their benefits for understanding spatial data and providing guidelines for future design improvements.

Contribution

It introduces a new interactive contour map system and empirically evaluates its impact on analysis tasks through a user study, filling a research gap.

Findings

Interactive features improve spatial data understanding.

User expertise influences effectiveness of interactions.

Design guidelines for contour map interactions are proposed.

Abstract

Contour maps are an essential tool for exploring spatial features of the terrain, such as distance, directions, and surface gradient among the contour areas. User interactions in contour-based visualizations create approaches to visual analysis that are noticeably different from the perspective of human cognition. As such, various interactive approaches have been introduced to improve system usability and enhance human cognition for complex and large-scale spatial data exploration. However, what user interaction means for contour maps, its purpose, when to leverage, and design primitives have yet to be investigated in the context of analysis tasks. Therefore, further research is needed to better understand and quantify the potentials and benefits offered by user interactions in contour-based geospatial visualizations designed to support analytical tasks. In this paper, we present a contour-based interactive geospatial visualization designed for analytical tasks. We conducted a crowd-sourced user study (N=62) to examine the impact of interactive features on analysis using contour-based geospatial visualizations. Our results show that the interactive features aid in their data analysis and understanding in terms of spatial data extent, map layout, task complexity, and user expertise. Finally, we discuss our findings in-depth, which will serve as guidelines for future design and implementation of interactive features in support of case-specific analytical tasks on contour-based geospatial views.