see the attached

HCDE 530: Information Visualization

Lesson 4 & 5

Design Assignment

Assignment 4.1 - Advanced Information Representation

Assignment 4.2 - Information Visualization for Hierarchical Data Representation Assignment 4.3 – Information Architecture Practice

Even in the single ppt slide, take consider “Information Visualization” to present your idea

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• Find either a network diagram or a hierarchy diagram and either paste it as a screenshot or as a photograph.

• Explain what the diagram is for and whether you think it achieves its purpose or not.

• Limit 1 slide

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This is a radial visual hierarchy diagram visualizing network traffic. It uses 4 concentric rings, each one representing an attribute of the transferred packets, such as secure mail. Users interpreting a left- to-right layout may assign more importance to an item on one side due to the cultural reading direction.

The rings in this example show the following information, from the innermost to the outermost ring:

1. Source IP address

2. Destination IP

3. Source port number

4. Destination port number.

The share in total traffic determines the size of a single circle segment. Entries with with the same value (e.g., the same IP, or the same port number) always use the same color.

Popular port numbers appear in reserved, unique colors (e.g. green is always used for port 80 - HTTP), which are not used again to display something else.

Traffic over secured channels is shown in brighter colors, whereas traffic over unsecured channels appears in darker color.

Circle segments are sorted on a ring, and grouped by the attributes on the inner rings.

Evaluation: I think the outer rings give a sense of the more area for the same proportion of data, e.g. a third of the outer ring looks much bigger than a third of the inner ring, so this distorts the overall sense of how significant something in the outer vs inner ring is. I don't know enough about the topic in context to know if this matters in this case but is some cases it may help emphasis a point, like compounding of downstream from an initial event, so it could be a useful technique. In this case thought I think 4 rectangles divided into color coded sections stacked on top of each other would have worked just as well.

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