Interaction history visualization

Interaction histories have been identified as a promising direction to support information workers in the execution of their work processes. However, to increase the workers' awareness about the structure of their work and to help them with the execution of their work processes, a suitable visualization is necessary. Up to now, interaction histories have typically been visualized with the classical Gantt, bar or line charts, neglecting the information contained in links between the individual items in an interaction history. Moreover, clear and empirically grounded guidance for the choice of the visualization is currently lacking. We present two graph-based visualizations for interaction histories and evaluate them against the classical visualizations in a controlled experiment. From the results, we derive a set of recommendations for the visualizations best suited for the different tasks within information workers' work processes.