Browsing by Author "Heller, Dennis"

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    Game-driven investigation and optimization of graph visualizations
    (2016) Heller, Dennis
    In the era of “Big Data”, information visualisation becomes more and more important to draw conclusions and implications from the massive amount of data. One research area of the information visualisation studies the visualisation of graphs in the form of node-link-diagrams. Under this topic, we are interested in the effects of graphs' aesthetic aspects on human task performance. There has already been research about some of the aesthetic criteria of graph visualisation, but - to the best of our knowledge - not about the ratio of node size and edge width. In this bachelor thesis, we investigated the effect of node size, edge width and the ratio of both on human task performance and on subjective aesthetic perception. This field study was wrapped in three online games. We tested 27 combinations of node size and edge width together with three levels of difficulty. Our post-game questionnaire polling the participants subjective perception of node/edge-ratio surfaced interesting results: there are clear optima for the node size and edge width and their ratio. We also found out that a too low ratio of node size and edge width is significant less appealing than a too high one. However, there was no significant correlation between the graph parameters and the human task performance measured by a self-derived score system.