English

A User Study on Hybrid Graph Visualizations

Human-Computer Interaction 2021-08-24 v1 Social and Information Networks

Abstract

Hybrid visualizations mix different metaphors in a single layout of a network. In particular, the popular NodeTrix model, introduced by Henry, Fekete, and McGuffin in 2007, combines node-link diagrams and matrix-based representations to support the analysis of real-world networks that are globally sparse but locally dense. That idea inspired a series of works, proposing variants or alternatives to NodeTrix. We present a user study that compares the classical node-link model and three hybrid visualization models designed to work on the same types of networks. The results of our study provide interesting indications about advantages/drawbacks of the considered models on performing classical tasks of analysis. At the same time, our experiment has some limitations and opens up to further research on the subject.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.10270,
  title  = {A User Study on Hybrid Graph Visualizations},
  author = {Emilio Di Giacomo and Walter Didimo and Fabrizio Montecchiani and Alessandra Tappini},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.10270},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Appears in the Proceedings of the 29th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2021)

R2 v1 2026-06-24T05:21:11.694Z