Navigating and visualizing long lists with fisheye view and graphical representation

Abstract

List is a widely used graphical user interface (GUI) component for organizing linearly structured information. It is simple and useful when containing only a few elements. However long lists are difficult to use because only a small part of the list is shown each time, to gain an overview or select elements from a long list the user usually needs to scroll the list many times. This paper tackles this problem by applying the fisheye strategy to the view of the list. The fisheye view dynamically changes the elements to bigger sizes to form a focal area around the mouse cursor while keeping the elements in the peripheral area in smaller sizes as context. This enables it to display a longer list within the same screen area. Therefore navigating the list can be more efficient. Moreover to further increase the information density, graphical representation of the elements' features is used. By doing so the list can be changed into a visualization tool.