A User Study on Hybrid Graph Visualizations
This work addresses visualization challenges for researchers analyzing complex networks, but it is incremental as it builds on existing hybrid models like NodeTrix.
The paper tackled the problem of comparing hybrid graph visualizations, specifically NodeTrix and its variants, against classical node-link models for analyzing globally sparse but locally dense networks, with results indicating advantages and drawbacks of each model on standard analysis tasks.
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.