Effect of diagram size, fan-out, and layout on the Useability of Tree Diagrams, an Empirical Study

摘要

Tree diagrams are commonly used to present hierarchal information in a wide variety of fields. The experiments described in this paper are the first of a series of experiments aimed at assessing the effect different factors have on tree diagram useability. Our ultimate goal is to contribute to a better understanding of how humans react to different characteristics of diagrammatic representations. In this paper we present three pairs of experiments that were held to assess the effect of three independent variables (diagram size, fan-out, and layout) on useability of tree diagrams. We also investigated the effect inspection time has on the way the dependent variables react to changes in the independent variables.