Description
Computing power and human cognition are two important factors which drives a successful communication between the humans and the computers. Human Computer Interaction is a field in Computer Science which tries to achieve this by enhancing interactivity between the two. Visualizing information concentrates on improvising the ability to display data and produce visually attractive data flow in the application. Visualization becomes important when the information being presented to the user involves a huge data set which conveys relationship between objects. Graphs have become a common method to represent data concerning large networks and relationship between the network entities. Visualizing graphs will not only improve the users reach to the network of information but enhances the interactivity between the user and the application. Exploring and analyzing the vast volumes of data becomes increasingly difficult. Hence it becomes very important for an application to present its data in a way which enhances the usability and provides a sense of satisfaction to its users. Graphs depicted as node-link diagrams are widely used to show relationship between the entities. It can be a social network, where graphs show the network of people and relationship between each of them, or a server network, which shows the interconnectivity between various computing servers, graph visualization has its inherent advantages. The research presents a novel idea of extending the social-network visualization to a class room environment in form of a Java Swing tool. The tool also enables the professors to report test or exam scores of each student in the class and understand their overall performance in comparison to others enrolled in the class. The main purpose of this research is to provide insight about graph visualization and help make design decisions for Human Factors Engineers and developers involved in creating graph oriented applications.
