Information Visualization and Usability: Tools for Human Comprehension

Abstract

This chapter makes a review on the progress of two growing areas in the field of communication: information visualization and usability. Information visualization has experimented a lot of changes during the last few years, especially with its arrival to the Internet and the development of different narrative forms by taking advantage of the main characteristics of the new environment. Something similar has occurred with the concept of usability. The following sections explore the significance of this young idea whose spread took place especially with the start of the Internet. With the objective of completing this theoretical framework, a small usability test was conducted with five renowned visualizations. The results of this test show that even the most salient journals do not fulfill many of the main usability recommendations. Hence, this area still has a considerable way to go regarding its appliance to information visualization.