Evaluation of information vizualization techniques for software usability

The amount of data generated by computer applications, especially by internet applications increased tremendously. Visualization is used to understand the data generated or to facilitate understanding. People can understand the data with the help of visualizations and reveal a new insight with the help of their mental and visual perception abilities. This insight may be a new information or decision. Information visualization deals with the visualization of the information at a higher level of the data. Many information visualization techniques are defined to visualize the information. A successful visualization designed by using those techniques enables software systems in many areas to be used more efficiently. In this study, a unifying evaluation method has been defined to measure the usability which is one of the most significant factors which affects the success of information visualization. In order to apply this method which is part of heuristic evaluation approach, a tool supporting the method has been developed. The usability experts evaluated the usability of three example visualizations through the developed tool. The usability problems have been found in the visualizations by analyzing the evaluation results. The relation between personality and visualization preferences has been also researched through the personality test completed by the participants during the evaluation process.