Performance Evaluation of Navigation Approaches on High-resolution Displays

We conducted a study to discover if the data navigation techniques suitable for high-resolution displays differed significantly from those traditionally used for single-screen desktop displays. The high-resolution capability of the former display makes it possible to show more data at once without having the user drill-down to get to the details. At the same time, the larger physical size makes it difficult for the user to interact with such a display using current day interaction techniques. Given these factors, we compare the performance of users on tasks that involve navigating into hierarchically-structured data. The specific visualization we use is a cushion treemap, displayed at multiple resolutions—on a 3x3, 17” tiled screen display; on a 2x2, 17” tiled screen display; on a single 17” screen display, and on a 66” SMART Board™. Through the performance evaluation of 24 users, we show that beyond a certain resolution and physical screen size, the drill-down technique fares relatively poorly, while the straightforward technique of displaying all the data at once results in better performance at the tasks we studied.