Showing flows of people and resources between multiple geographic locations is a challenging visualisation problem. We conducted two quantitative user studies to evaluate different visual representations for such dense many-to-many flows. In our first study we compared a bundled node-link flow map representation and OD Maps [37] with a new visualisation we call MapTrix. Like OD Maps, MapTrix overcomes the clutter associated with a traditional flow map while providing geographic embedding that is missing in standard OD matrix representations. We found that OD Maps and MapTrix had similar performance while bundled node-link flow map representations did not scale at all well. Our second study compared participant performance with OD Maps and MapTrix on larger data sets. Again performance was remarkably similar.
@article{arxiv.1908.02052,
title = {Many-to-Many Geographically-Embedded Flow Visualisation: An Evaluation},
author = {Yalong Yang and Tim Dwyer and Sarah Goodwin and Kim Marriott},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.02052},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Presented at IEEE Conference on Information Visualization (InfoVis 2016). Awarded Best Paper Honorable Mention. Part of PhD thesis arXiv:1908.00662