During our meeting last week we discussed ways in which we
could refine our visualization. We tried to come up with several usage
scenarios to guide our progress and make the tool more useful. We plan to look at different aspects of the
algorithm and try to implement a way in which our tool can demonstrate each
part. Dr. Dwyer suggested coming up with
questions that we had when we first learned to algorithm then altering the tool
to answer these questions. This will
help us keep sight of our goal to produce a helpful learning tool and give us a
better guide to reach our goal.
Additionally, Elena and Dr. Dwyer expressed interested in
making the tool more user friendly. Dr.
Dwyer suggested that instead of having a combo box for every node we should
consider having a static position for the combo box. Instead of having to click several times to
view information about a node, Dr. Dwyer suggested selecting a “mode” using the
combo box and hovering over each node to retrieve the information. This saves the user several clicks in order
to get the same information. In addition to Dr. Dwyer’s suggestion, Elena
recommended having pause/play buttons to build the graph instead of having to
user the slider or clicking the right arrow to build. This makes it much easier to see the graph
being built incrementally. Over these
last couple days, I have implemented both of these features and cleaned up the
flash builder code.
Finally, we discussed removing some of the clutter on the
visualization. Right now the user can
select “Unsat Clauses” mode and view ALL of the unsat clauses in the text box
on the side of the page. This
information is not very useful to someone learning the algorithm and can become
very overwhelming. The original intent
for displaying all of the unsat clauses was to show how the amount of unsat
clauses changes throughout the algorithm. We decided that it would be much
easier to visualize the change in unsat clauses graphically and discussed the
possibility of having a sort of timeline. We are currently looking at tools
that we can use to display the timeline and graph. Hopefully next week we will have made a
decision regarding the timeline and can continue progress.
-Mary
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