Visualizing Event Sequence Data

By Kevin Jahns (314391) & Dominik Sturm (332270)

Seminar: Post-Desktop User Interfaces

RWTH Aachen

Visualizing Event Sequence Data

Sankey Diagram

Riehmann, P., Hanfler, M., and Froehlich, B.
Interactive sankey diagrams. In IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, 2005. INFOVIS 2005. (Oct 2005), 233–240.

Sankey Diagram

Visualizing Time

Interaction

+ Intuitive

+ Flexible

+ Well suited for flows

+ Visualizes proportions

- Created by hand

- Requires a lot of space

Sankey Diagram

Life Lines

Plaisant, C., Milash, B., Rose, A., Widoff, S., and Shneiderman, B.
Lifelines: Visualizing personal histories. In Proceedings of the
SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (1996), 221–227.

Juvenile Records in 1996

Visualizing Records

HTTP Requests

In the Chrome Developer Tools

HTTP Requests

In the Chrome Developer Tools

More information on-demand

HTTP Requests

In the Chrome Developer Tools

Focus on relevant data

+ Intuitive

+ Requires little space

- Only shows the existence of an event

- Unsuited for complex data

Life Lines

MIGAARD

Bade, R., Schlechtweg, S., and Miksch, S.
Connecting time-oriented data and information to a coherent interactive visualization. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2004), 105–112.

DOM operations (blue)
JavaScript (yellow)
Painting (green)
CSS styling (purple)

Performance Debugging

In the Chrome Developer Tools

Overview first
More information on-demand

+ Requires little space

+ Visualizes proportions

- Approximations only

MIGAARD

MatrixWave

Zhao, J., Liu, Z., Dontcheva, M., Hertzmann, A., and Wilson, A. Matrixwave: Visual comparison of event sequence data. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2015), 259–268.

Visualizing Clickstream Data

Where do visitors entry a website?
Where do visitors leave a website?
Which path is frequently used?

A -> main page B -> shop C -> Contact D -> support page

Matrix Wave

Comparing

slightly more traffic volume on A

average traffic volume

Interaction

Pages: myweb.com
Visitors: 1114838, 1502438 (+34,77%)

Interaction

+ Good overview

+ Good information
in detail

+ Visualizes browsing trails

- Hard to learn
(not intuitive)

- Needs a lot of space for visualization

Matrix Wave

Time Curves

Bach, B., Shi, C., Heulot, N., Madhyastha, T., Grabowski, T., and Dragicevic, P. Time curves: Folding time to visualize patterns of temporal evolution in data. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Graphics 22, 1 (Jan 2016), 559–568.

Time Curves

Folding