Cartesian vs. Radial - A Comparative Evaluation of Two Visualization Tools

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A heatmap representation for the eye fixations recorded in an eye tracking study

It was not clear if the Cartesian Timeline Trees or the radial TimeRadarTrees technique was more accurate and faster with respect to several tasks.

To find an answer to this question we designed an eye tracking experiment and recorded accuracy, completion times, and eye movement data.

As a major result, we found out that the TimeRadarTrees approach could be understood after reading a ten minutes printed tutorial and that the thumbnails are used more frequently in the radial diagram than in the Cartesian counterpart.

If you are interested in this work please read our paper presented at the International Symposium on Visual Computing in Las Vegas in 2008 or write an email.

I am very thankful to Felix Bott and Rainer Lutz who had the time to conduct and control the eye tracking experiment.