Finding Business Information by Visualizing Document Activity

Charlotte Visualization Center

Xiaoyu Wang

Palo Alto Research Center

Bill Janssen and Eric Bier

Palo Alto Research Center

Problem Statement• The growth of business data exceeds our

ability to find desired information

• The task to find information is exhausting:

• 3.7 hours/week on search but not finding information

• 2.5 hours/week on creating data, which can’t be found in the future

Without efficient way of finding business information,

enterprise may suffer from less effective business operations.

--- Interactive Data Coorp.

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Where’s the Business Information?

• Embedded with employee’s daily document activities

• Presented in heterogenous data/applications

• Stored in local/online storage repositories

• Need specific knowledge to retrieve and make sense of

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They are EVERYWHERE!!

Plus, employees are always expected to remember these activities in an Enterprise environment.

And Sadly, no matter how awesome one is,one can’t avoid forgetting those activities.

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Research Question

What is the efficient abstraction to What is the efficient abstraction to

recall and manage personal recall and manage personal

document activities?document activities?

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Taste PipelineOverviewOverview Current ImplementationCurrent Implementation Future DirectionFuture Direction

Computational Pre-AnalysesComputational Pre-Analyses Visual Analytic SystemVisual Analytic System UsersUsers

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How to properly visualize the document activities?

• Pre-design survey results: (30 participants)

• The date and time when events happened (e.g., when documents were received, read, created, or modified);

• Content keywords that users associate with activities (e.g. the title of a document or the name of a person or company);

• Document types or applications that are used to perform a particular type of activity (e.g., Microsoft Excel or Apple Mail)

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TASTE:

• Design Principles: Provide orthogonal information

Restrain the usage of screen space to minimum

Present information as direct as possible

Provide flexible user exploration paths

Visual Analytics system to manage Temporal Activities and Story TElling.

Cross platform design. JAVA+JOGL+Python+HTML

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Temporal View

• Enables interactive temporal explorations

• Present usage patterns and trends for individual activities

• Provide detail information and summarized information for particular time period

Reflecting “The date and time when events happened”

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Facets View

• Automatically extract facets in certain time span

• Automatically aggregate documents with related information

• Provide information filtering and sorting

• Detail information through mouse interactions.

Reflecting “Document types or applications”

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Entity Tag View

• Entities are automatically parsed from documents in particular time period

• Entities are presented with Tag Cloud metaphor to indicate individual frequency and importance.

Reflecting “Content keywords that users associate with activities”

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Detail View

• Focus on depicting single document from different perspectives:

• Temporal Information

• Related Documents

• Entity Information

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But wait, here is more: Story Creation

Allows knowledge workers to construct stories based on their discoveries and findings from the visual interface

Provide supporting evidences for proposals or reports.

Group events based on user’s own memories

Share with others through communicating with another instance of TASTE

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Why should one use TASTE?

• Can TASTE be more effective than regular tools in helping users reconstruct document activities?

• What are the determining factors that make TASTE better or worse at helping users organize and manage their document activities?

Questions that we asked:

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User Studies

• Two studies conducted : Laboratory (20 participants )and Field Study (three weeks, 12 participants)

• Two sessions per each study per person, counter balanced

• Three measures taken: Accuracy, Efficiency and Confidence

• Total of 21 tasks per participant

• TASTE v.s. Regular Toolsets that participants normally use

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Significant ResultsLab Study Field Study

Document retrieval with TASTE was more accurate. As suggested by results (F (1, 78) = 45.49, p < 0.0001), TASTE has an overall 17.3% accuracy gain (as computed by comparing mean values (90.5-77.13) /77.13) during the two sessions,

TASTE provided better retrieval accuracy. The ANOVA result (F(1, 82) = 8.80, p < 0.004) indicates significant differences between TASTE and the regular tools on the accuracy of retrieving information. Even though participants had prior knowledge of the data, TASTE still delivered nearly an 8% ((84.88–78.57)/78.57) increase in retrieved information

TASTE was more efficient. The ANOVA result finds differences between TASTE and the regular tools (F(1,78) = 10.84, p < 0.001). As illustrated in Figure 5(B), timed comparisons show a 31.1% reduction in time ((166-114.3)/ 166) with TASTE.

A significant efficiency improvement. A significant ANOVA result (F(1,82) = 6.13 p < 0.015) indicates that TASTE helped participants perform the tasks efficiently. As suggested in Figure 7(B), TASTE reduced by 36.8% ((176.3-111.3)/176.3) the time spent on searching for document information.

Users felt more confident with TASTE retrieval. We expected TASTE to increase user confidence in organizing document activities, and the results from ANOVA (F(1, 78) = 17.12, p < 0.0001) support this expectation.With TASTE, users felt more confident in the accuracy of their answers in the lab study

Significant confidence increase. Initially we were expecting the confidence value to be similar between TASTE and RT, since participants had prior knowledge about the location of their own data. However, ANOVA (F(1, 82) = 16.16, p < 0.0001) suggests a very significant difference between the confidence values participants gave for both tools. As shown in the Figure 6 (right), participants trusted TASTE more than the tools they used daily

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In summary & in quotes

• Cohesive Visual Exploration• “[TASTE] is very good at giving a quick impression of data across the board. I like how

you can mix different types of files/people and represent them cohesively.”;

• Visual Facilitation of sense-making• “ By looking at all the views [in TASTE], I can easily relate all the information together

and quickly see what is going on from different perspectives.”

• Temporal Searches• “The frequency ranking is very useful and it’s not available in other tools like Spotlight

search. TASTE really provides you the flexibility in retrieving information in time frames and helps you reconstruct the amount of time spent on the various activities.”

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Thanks

• Thanks to Eric Bier, Bill Ribarsky, Bill Janssen, Kyle Dent, Stu Card and Wenwen Dou for their supports throughout the project

• Question please

• Xiaoyu (Derek) Wang: xwang25@uncc.edu

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Intern Poster

Xiaoyu Wang xwang25@uncc.edu

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Eric

Xiaoyu

Intern Poster Instruction

EricXiaoyu

Intern Poster Instruction

PARC

We are getting here…Future Work

Story Board Disassemble

Construct Knowledge Structure

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EricXiaoyu

Intern Poster

Instruction

PARC

It’s Intern Poster time again.

Here are the instructions

Xiaoyu Wang xwang25@uncc.edu

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