Investigating the Effects of Splitting Detailed Views in Overview+Detail Interfaces

Abstract

While several techniques offer more than one detailed view in Overview+Detail (O+D) interfaces, the optimal number of detailed views has not been investigated. But the answer is not trivial: using a single detailed view offers a larger display size but only allows a sequential exploration of the overview; using several detailed views reduces the size of each view but allows a parallel exploration of the overview. In this paper we investigate the benefits of splitting the detailed view in O+D interfaces for working with very large graphs. We implemented an O+D interface where the overview is displayed on a large screen while 1, 2 or 4 split views are displayed on a tactile tablet. We experimentally evaluated the effect of the number of split views according to the number of nodes to connect. Using 4 split views is better than 1 and 2 for working on more than 2 nodes.