Document Type

Technical Report

Publication Date

2002-08-29

Filename

wucse-2002-30.pdf

Technical Report Number

WUCSE-2002-30

Abstract

Program visualization has the potential to be an important tool for people who seek to observe and understand the behavior of a running computation. This thesis focuses on alleviating barriers to the realization of this potential that pertain to the design of a visualization system and to insufficient knowledge about how people take advantage of program visualizations. Our major contribution is the design of a visualization approach capable of improving user’s performance through the use of economy of information and tasks. We present evidence from our empirical studies that this type of economy promotes animations capable of significantly improving people’s understanding of the computation. We apply this knowledge to develop a system for creating application-specific visualizations solely through interactions with program visualizations and textual views of the computation, thus promoting economy of interaction. The system is built around the principle that animation viewers are also the creators of animations and systematically refine the visualizations to suit their momentary goal.

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Permanent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7936/K75M642T

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