Visage: An All-in-One Tool A Paper by Roth, Lucas, Senn, et al. Presented by Josh Steele

Lots of Good Things Out There.. Table Lens –Focuses attention on subsets while still seeing the context IVEE –Rapidly creates multiple DQ sliders SAGE –Rapid Design of visualizations that integrate multiple attributes

I want all that and more…. Select info from multiple apps, visualizations and tools – and combine them Enable rapid generation of visualizations (on the fly!) Filter, control level of detail, navigate, create new info whenever needed Share and communicate information

Introducing Visage Information Centric paradigm (more on this next slide) Dynamic Visualization Generation Interactive Info manipulation –Partitioning, filtering, combining, detail level (drill down/roll up) Assembling, laying out and interactively presenting info to others

Centering in on Information Application-Centric –The File is the object – need applications to retrieve and display –Users can’t “touch” data Document-Centric –Document is the object, and can be directly manipulated –May serve as containers for other objects –Can visualize relationships between documents –Users can “get their hands on” the documents Information centric –The data element is the object –Drag and drop at any level of granularity –OO approach introduced in Smalltalk et al –Used in Visage

Demo Presentation *Please see in-class TV* An abbreviated version is available at

Main Components Elements –The atomically-manipulable graphical objects –Bars in bar chart, text label, point in a chart –1 to many relationship – one database element may be represented in many ways Frames –Hold the elements (are actually elements themselves) –Provide grouping and reference for elements –Serve as anchor points for scripts (which guide most of Visage’s behavior) Scripts allow new values to be calculated

Show it off! Presentation tools built in Allows interactivity in the slides themselves! Each slide is a fully functional Visage frame

Visage! What’s it good for? Representing data in several views (not just in your typical charts(pie, bar, etc)) Dynamic Queries on that data Quick presentation generation (with interactivity during the presentation) Selecting only certain information

HCI Metrics User Performance - ***?? Error Recovery - ?? User Satisfaction - ?? Learning Time - *** Retention - ****

How does it compare? Number of variables? Number of data points? Pixel use? When would you not use this?