À Table! Improving Temporal Navigation in Soccer Ranking Tables
À Table! is an enhanced soccer ranking table to improve temporal navigation, by combining two novel interaction techniques. Ranking tables order soccer teams as rows, and columns contain e. g., their points or number of scored goals. Because they are a snapshot of a championship at a time t, they are constantly updated with new results. Such updates change the rows vertical order, which makes the tracking of a team, over time, difficult. We observed that current tables on the web do not support such changes very well, are generally hard to read, and lack dynamic interactions. This contrasts with the extensive use of temporal trends by soccer analysts in articles. We introduce two interactive techniques to better explore time: DRAG-CELL is based on direct manipulation of values to browse ranks; VIZ-RANK uses a transient line chart of team ranks to visually explore a championship. An on-line evaluation with 143 participants shows that each technique efficiently supports a set of temporal tasks, not supported by current ranking tables, while not breaking the flow of users. This paves the way for efficiently introducing advanced visual exploration techniques to millions of soccer enthusiasts who use tables everyday, as well as other application domains which use ranking tables.
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