THE APPLICATION OF LEGIBILITY TECHNIQUES TO ENHANCE INFORMATION VISUALIZATIONS

This paper shows how previous research into navigation through urban e nvironments, which has emerged from the discipline of urban planning, can be adapted to enhance the design of information visualizations, Th e paper draws on Kevin Lynch's seminal work on the legibility of urban landscapes in order to propose a set of general techniques which fan be applied to the task of information visualization, It describes a sp ecific instantiation of these techniques called LEADS, a legibility sy stem which post-processes the output of a range of existing visualizat ion systems in order to enhance their legibility, The paper provides f our examples of the application of LEADS to different information visu alizations, Following this, it discusses experimental work, the conclu sions of which provide some tentative support for the likely success o f this approach. The outcomes of this work are both a recognition of t he important relationship between the disciplines of urban planning an d the design of information visualizations as well as more concrete al gorithms to be used by the designers of such visualizations.