The effect of data-relatedness in interactive glyphs

Interactive visualization of multidimensional data is an important activity in many information acquisition tasks. We introduce a new interaction method for glyphs, an adoption of the ´small multiples´ presentation method. It has been used extensively in printed graphics and also in scientific visualization, but its applications in information visualization have been few. We propose a method for interacting with small multiple displays that allows rapid and easy experimentation with glyph property assignments. In addition, we present findings on the relation between the glyphs and the data. The results of our experiment with 18 subjects support the idea that a data-related glyph is more favored by the users and about 13% more accurate than an unrelated glyph in information acquisition tasks. Additionally, the proposed visualization technique may prove to be efficient enough for non-experts to explore multi-dimensional data sets.