Understanding Concept Maps: A Closer Look at How People Organise Ideas

Padilla, Stefano; Methven, Thomas S.; Robb, David A.; Chantler, Mike J.

Abstract

Research into creating visualisations that organise ideas into concise concept maps often focuses on implicit mathematical and statistical theories which are built around algorithmic efficacy or visual complexity. Although there are multiple techniques which attempt to mathematically optimise this multi-dimensional problem, it is still unknown how to create concept maps that are immediately understandable to people. In this paper, we present an in-depth qualitative study observing the behaviour and discussing the strategy used by non-expert participants to create, interact, update and communicate a concept map that represents a collection of research ideas. Our results show non-expert individuals create concept maps differently to visualisation algorithms. We found that our participants prioritised narrative, landmarks, abstraction, clarity, and simplicity. Finally, we derive design recommendations from our results which we hope will inspire future algorithms that automatically create more usable and compelling concepts maps better suited to the natural behaviours and needs of users.

Citation

Padilla, S., Methven, T. S., Robb, D. A., & Chantler, M. J. (2017). Understanding Concept Maps: A Closer Look at How People Organise Ideas. In CHI '17 Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (815-827). https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025977

• Conference Name: 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Explore, Innovate, Inspire
• Conference Location: Denver, Colorado, USA
• Start Date: May 6, 2017
• End Date: May 11, 2017
• Acceptance Date: Dec 12, 2016
• Publication Date: May 2, 2017
• Deposit Date: Oct 23, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 24, 2018
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Pages: 815-827
• Book Title: CHI '17 Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 9781450346559
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025977
• Keywords: Design; Interfaces; Information; Visualisation; Data; Interaction; Concept Maps; Knowledge; Organisation.
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1320948