1. UFinder An interactive tool for data exploration and decision-making Jeanette Bautista Micheline Manske

2. Our Goal Help people make decisions about which university or college to attend

3. Graduation rate # applications accepted Average Math SAT Additional fees Living Expenses Cost of Books Expenditure per student # Students Tuition Student/Faculty Ratio What do you care about?

4. Graduation rate Additional fees Living Expenses Cost of Books Expenditure per student # Students Tuition Student/Faculty Ratio Room & Board School costs Cost per Year Math SATACTVerbal SAT Top 25%Marks Caliber of students New students enrolled/accepted Applications received/ accepted Acceptance Environment BoardRoom Personal What do you care about?

5. Graduation rate Additional fees Living Expenses Cost of Books Expenditure per student # Students Tuition Student/Faculty Ratio Room & Board School costs Cost per Year Math SATACTVerbal SAT Top 25%Marks Caliber of students New students enrolled/accepted Applications received/ accepted Acceptance Environment BoardRoom Personal

6. Graduation rate Additional fees Living Expenses Cost of Books Expenditure per student # Students Tuition Student/Faculty Ratio Room & Board School costs Cost per Year Math SATACTVerbal SAT Top 25%Marks Caliber of students New students enrolled/accepted Applications received/ accepted Acceptance Environment BoardRoom Personal

7. Our Inspiration HomeFinderValueCharts (Williamson & Shneiderman, 1992) (Carenini & Loyd, 2004) + filter out large number objects on with undesired range of attributes - can’t compare attributes of two objects easily + compare objects’ attributes with ease - not good with large data sets

8. Demo

9. Evaluation How does a ValueChart enhance the decision-making process over standard dynamic queries? Informal User Study -6 participants -2 interfaces (with ValueCharts and without ValueCharts) -Task: find three schools that they would consider finding more information about.

10. Evaluation

12. Conclusion Ufinder 1300 schools on 16 Attributes Drill down to fine level of detail while abstracting where possible Interactively filter to discover trends in the data Interactively specify preferences to explore tradeoffs

13. Questions? References: Carenini, Giuseppe, and Loyd, John. ValueCharts: Analyzing Linear Models Expressing Preferences and Evaluation. In publication. Williamson, Christopher, and Shneiderman, Ben. The Dynamic HomeFinder: Evaluating dynamic queries in a real-estate information exploration system. Proc. ACM SIGIR’92, pp 338-346.

14. Thank you!