Perception of Animated Node-Link Diagrams for Dynamic Graphs

Abstract

Effective visualization of dynamic graphs remains an open research topic, and many state-of-the-art tools use animated node-link diagrams for this purpose. Despite its intuitiveness, the effectiveness of animation in nodelink diagrams has been questioned, and several empirical studies have shown that animation is not necessarily superior to static visualizations. However, the exact mechanics of perceiving animated node-link diagrams are still unclear. In this paper, we study the impact of different dynamic graph metrics on user perception of the animation. After deriving candidate visual graph metrics, we perform an exploratory user study where participants are asked to reconstruct the event sequence in animated node-link diagrams. Based on these findings, we conduct a second user study where we investigate the most important visual metrics in depth. Our findings show that node speed and target separation are prominent visual metrics to predict the performance of event sequencing tasks.