Facilitating Exploration with Interaction Snapshots under High Latency
This addresses the challenge of maintaining interactivity for users exploring large datasets under high latency conditions, though it is an incremental improvement focused on UX design rather than backend solutions.
The paper tackled the problem of high latency in interactive data exploration by proposing interaction snapshots, a UX design that allows users to interact concurrently while responses load asynchronously. In a user study, participants completed tasks like extrema and trend identification with little negative impact for latencies up to 5 seconds.
Latency is, unfortunately, a reality when working with large datasets. Guaranteeing imperceptible latency for interactivity is often prohibitively expensive: the application developer may be forced to migrate data processing engines or deal with complex error bounds on samples, and to limit the application to users with high network bandwidth. Instead of relying on the backend, we propose a simple UX design---interaction snapshots. Responses of requests from the interactions are asynchronously loaded in "snapshots". With interaction snapshots, users can interact concurrently while the snapshots load. Our user study participants found it useful not to have to wait for each result and easily navigate to prior snapshots. For latency up to 5 seconds, participants were able to complete extrema, threshold, and trend identification tasks with little negative impact.