Miguel A. Nacenta

Yichun Zhao, Miguel A. Nacenta, Mahadeo A. Sukhai et al.

Despite recognition of the value of diversity, the way work takes place can fail to support blind or low-vision employees, especially in collaborative work settings. This paper examines how professional teams with diverse visual abilities use information representations (e.g., PDF documents, spreadsheets and charts). A diary study with follow-up individual interviews (23 participants with mixed abilities from 5 teams) and 2 separate focus groups (7 participants from 2 other teams) allowed us to characterize key dimensions of the role of representations in the workplace into four types of interrelated failures and workarounds, influenced by workplace stigmas and shaped by evolving social dynamics towards interdependent information work. We contribute this new empirically supported conceptual understanding of representation use in workplaces that can help design and improve the experiences of mixed-ability teams doing knowledge work in the current technological landscape.

Alexandra Lee, Daniel Archambault, Miguel A. Nacenta

Dynamic networks can be challenging to analyze visually, especially if they span a large time range during which new nodes and edges can appear and disappear. Although it is straightforward to provide interfaces for visualization that represent multiple states of the network (i.e., multiple timeslices) either simultaneously (e.g., through small multiples) or interactively (e.g., through interactive animation), these interfaces might not support tasks in which disjoint timeslices need to be compared. Since these tasks are key for understanding the dynamic aspects of the network, understanding which interactive visualizations best support these tasks is important. We present the results of a series of laboratory experiments comparing two traditional approaches (small multiples and interactive animation), with a more recent approach based on interactive timeslicing. The tasks were performed on a large display through a touch interface. Participants completed 24 trials of three tasks with all techniques. The results show that interactive timeslicing brings benefit when comparing distant points in time, but less benefits when analyzing contiguous intervals of time.