Timelines: An interactive system for the collection and visualization of temporal data

Human--Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers collect, analyze, and interpret information about user behavior in order to make inferences about the systems they are designing. This paper describes four paradigm shifts in HCI research and discusses how each influences data collection and analysis. Based on these trends the implications for tool design are outlined. We then describe the Timelines system, which was created to address both these paradigm shifts and two years of user testing results from the VANNA system 4, 5, 6. The Timelines system is an interactive data collection and visualization tool which supports both quantitative and qualitative analysis, and exploratory sequential data analysis. It accepts many diverse types of temporal data and provides the user with powerful data manipulation and color, graphical visualization tools. We summarize four representative case studies which reflect different methodological approaches and research goals, typical of our user community. From this the implications for the design of our system (and for data collection and analysis tools in general) are described.