Visualizing Online Activity

by Stephen G. Eick

The dot revolution established the e-channel as a critical component of corporation/customer interaction. A characteristic aspect of this channel is its rich instrumentation, hereby every visit, click, page view, purchasing decision, repeat visit, and other fine-grain detail describing online visitor activity can be captured automatically on the fly and stored for later analysis. The problem for business managers and site operators, as well as for Web site designers, is that the huge volume of relevant data overwhelms conventional analysis tools (such as spreadsheets and reports). To overcome this problem, I describe how my company, Visual Insights, and other organizations have developed information visualization tools for displaying Web site structure, navigation, paths, flows, and activity.

Information visualization is a research area in computer science that focuses on creating rich visual interfaces to help users understand and navigate through complex information spaces. Data sets are frequently large and time-varying and usually involve mutedly mentionable structure.

Unlike scientific visualization, where the research forces is creating 3 D representations of physical phenomena, the fundamental problem for developers of information visualization is that, because the data is non-capital, it lacks natural physical representations. Thus, the information visualization research challenge is how to invent new visual metaphors for presenting information and developing ways to manipulate the metaphors to make sense of the information.

11. Discuss the given statementsandtranslate theminto Russian:

1. Modern programming languages have vastly enriched the art of programming.

2. A large part of work involved in actually getting a program running can be done by the computer itself.

3. The process of discovering, locating and correcting errors proved to be one of major difficulty.

4. The execution of the procedure is done entirely by the computer, with no human intervention.

5. There are so many chances of making mistakes in programming that most programs do not work when first tried.

6. There are so many chances of making mistakes in programming that most programs do not work when first tried.

7. Computers are used in many branches of engineering.

8. The volume and complexity of business and scientific data processing having grown nowadays enormously, electronic computers are widely used in a wide variety of applications involving the data processing.

9. Human – computer interaction (HCI) has long been a focal for innovative, multidisciplinary computing research and development.

10. At the dawn of a new millennium, it is time to ask where this increasingly important field (i.e HCI) is going.

11. What are the critical technical challenges and opportunities that will define HCI work in the years to come?

12. What are the approaches that will sustain and enhance the vitality and effectiveness of HCI?

12. Find answers these questions in the text below:

1. What developments are driving the development of completely new interfaces?

2. What has inspired a whole cottage industry to develop to improve today's graphical user interface?

3. In what way have XML-based formats changed the user interface?

4. What types of computers are certain to benefit from speech technology?

5. Name a process where a mouse is particularly useful and a process where it is not so useful.

6. What facilities are multimodal interfaces likely to offer in the future?

7. What type of input device will be used to give vision to the user interface?

8. What development has led to an interest in intelligent agents?

9. List ways in which intelligent agents can be used.