Mick McQuaid

I’d like to continue our exploration of TreeMaps this week with a followon exercise. While I was planning this, Jakob Hilden contributed an interesting alternative filesystem visualization I’d like to share. The following picture is an annotated screenshot of Liquifile.

(picture links to Liquifile website)

Jakob also points out a Quicktime video you can see to understand better what’s going on here. Jakob adds that he especially likes the horizontal time dimension, which he thinks can be useful to find files from a certain timeframe.

This raises an important issue for our treemap exercise. How do people use the treemaps you designed last time? What kinds of questions can people answer? I’d like to explore this by asking you to redesign your treemaps to accommodate a fictional user, Professor Farnsworth. Farnsworth is constantly running out of space on his laptop and tries to organize his files in a way that allows him to keep track of things kept locally and remotely.

Farnsworth has a number of kinds of files and has tried to create a hierarchy allowing him to find a given file without resorting to googling. In particular, he’d like to find files related to research topics, research projects, classes he’s teaching, skills he’s trying to acquire, and administrative work. Instead of searching for related keywords, he’d like to be able to browse for things created at the same time or while working on the same topic, project, class, or skill. Many of these turn out to overlap, so he keeps changing the hierarchy of folders, sometimes using the four headings above, but also using headings indicating the source of files, whether created by Farnsworth or others. Another heading has to do with file types. Farnsworth takes a lot of photos and creates a lot of videos. These files threaten limited laptop space more drastically than text files. A further complication is that Farnsworth takes a lot of baby photos and baby videos that are not part of his work but wind up on his laptop. They’re large and numerous and need to be organized largely by time so that he does not bore people by showing them the same images over and over.

Finally, Farnsworth needs to share some files and keep others private. He’d like to be able to easily put sections of the filesystem on a shared server, so that the appropriate groups of faculty, students, and staff can see only what they’re supposed to see. Examples of things that must be kept private include budgets for projects, grades for classes, evaluations of staff members, evaluations of prospective students and faculty, and plans with personnel implications. In all of these cases, it’s difficult and complicated (technically not philosophically) to know exactly who can and can’t see each file, but it is possible. The current form of organization is problematic in that files for different audiences reside in the same folders.

So the exercise is to create a TreeMap visualization of Farnsworth’s laptop-based filesystem that helps solve these problems more than just what a basic TreeMap application does.

We have a guest this week, Erik Hofer, whose various infovis and scivis projects can be seen on the third floor at SI North. Erik gave an initial title of Beyond the Desktop, but that may have changed slightly. In any event, the emphasis is the same. We’ve talked about users, and Erik’s talk will place users in environments outside the office.

Consider Shoemaker (2001). This paper is primarily concerned with users who work together and have different information needs. I have personally been in group situations where a single display showed a log of individual activities. In my case, representatives of multiple groups working together, it would have appealed to individuals to have glasses like those described in this paper, allowing some members of one group to shut out the logs of the other groups, while members assigned to bridging across groups needed to take a superficial look at everything. This scenario differs a little from Shoemaker’s private vs. public setup. Can you think of other situations where it might be advantageous to have a single display, but have parts hidden from some users? One issue to consider is motivation. In the example given above, the users would have considered information hiding a benefit. In the paper, privacy preferences were considered an issue.

What about the private / public distinction? Research by Mark Ackerman showed that people altered their work habits (in a good way) when they knew some limited information about what their collaborators were doing. If you agree, can you think of ways to extend this public / private display to stimulate this alteration?

Baudisch (2002) demonstrates the value of a focus plus context display that doesn’t require you to switch views during the course of work. One limitation of this study is that it employs very expensive displays that you could not afford to distribute on a one-on-one basis to everyone. The authors give a few examples of scenarios for use, including web designers, graphic designers, GIS specialists, chip designers, drivers, and gamers. It might be worthwhile to think about scenarios in which you might use these displays. Suppose you had one in a conference room, dining room, classroom, lobby, or other location where many people congregate. Can you give an example of how a focus plus context display could help in one of these environments?

North Campus has numerous tiled displays and opportunities for tiled displays in public spaces. North Quad, SI’s future home, may have tiled displays in public spaces. Ball (2007) explores such displays with respect to physical navigation. Although they use a somewhat elaborate setup, the past year has seen at least one very inexpensive package for gesture interaction with a display. It’s realistic to imagine interactive building directories, for instance, appearing on public displays. One interesting issue has to do with how multiple people approach public displays at the same time. Do they take turns? Do they respond to each other based on “eavesdropping”? Is there a way to represent situational information on a large tiled display that adds more than a linear combination of individual interactions?