VizEval: An Experimental System for the Study of Program Visualization Quality

The VizEval Suite is an environment designed to support experimentation with and evaluation of program visualization attributes that affect the user's ability to grasp essential concepts. In this paper, we describe the VizEval Suite and an initial experiment conducted both as a test-bed of the VizEval Suite and to study how perceptual/cognitive characteristics of the visualization affect the users' understanding of the program visualization. VizEval is designed to simplify the creation and analysis of such studies. Our experimental results show that some perceptual/cognitive characteristics that help one task (e.g., detection of critical information) may harm another (e.g., localization of critical items), and vice versa. The VizEval software is available for download at http://www.cs.uga.edu/~eileen/VizEval/