Evaluation on visualization methods of dynamic collaborative relationships for project management

Using visualization methods to describe collaborative relationships can form a more intuitive and conducive graphical representation of these relationships, helping us better understand and analyze complex dynamic collaborative relationships. To explore a suitable visualization form for collaborative relationship analysis, we propose a task classification method to evaluate the two visual methods (node-link and adjacency matrix) which represent the static features and the three methods (animation, small multiples, and timeline) which represent the time characteristics of dynamic graphs. We present an evaluation system and design a task-based user evaluation experiment with the Dutch railway project data. By collecting and analyzing task completion time and error rates, we summarize our findings from the evaluation experiment and list three key recommendations to provide preliminary clues to visual designers: (1) Node-link has a better performance on small-scale project management. (2) Timeline has more advantages in the expression of project time management. (3) Animation will be a good choice when you need to check the status of tasks in the project management for a period of time. These findings can help the designers discover faster and more accurate ways to visualize the characteristics and changes of collaborative relationships, thus promoting the smooth progress of collaborative work.