Is there anything that would make it easier? I'd like to be able to make rescaling as intuitive as possible, so suggestions welcome.
(The intention is that the point you drag stays fixed and the rest of the chart will expand if you drag up or right and contract if you drag down or left. The chart can be panned by dragging either of the axes).
I wrote a long screed in reply to this, and then lost the whole lot with a misclick, so maybe I'm not the ideally competent user. But since data visualisation could also involve the interface with the visualisation, here's tedious detail.
The
paradigmbehaviour I expected at first was that click-and-drag would select a box to expand into the whole plot, with the
Full Year and
Recent Progress buttons providing the undo function.
Current behaviour, where undo is also provided by a drag, has the fundamental problem that it's not a homomorphism
1: after a click-and-drag that didn't do what I expected, clicking again and dragging the pointer back to where I started doesn't get me back to the same place (nor do two drags releasing the button midway have the same effect as one continuous drag between the same endpoints). I try to undo and find myself at -4000 distance or so with only IronOx's progress displayed.
The other real difficulty is that the scale of response doesn't seem natural or consistent. A long drag right sometimes expands the time axis enormously; sometimes an attempt to contract the axis leaves the graph at the same scale but changes the grid lines to a fine mesh.
If after overexpanding the time axis I manage to contract again, I often find the distance axis has contracted too. Possibly the manoeuvre has made the app oversensitive to a small wobble up or down as I drag left? The X and Y scales need to be completely independent. Of course when the distance axis is overcontracted it's very hard, and quite unnatural, to find the right place to click and reexpand: particularly if the zero line is off the screen.
Perhaps I'm overconditioned to expect the axis to be on the zero line, but the location of the time axis scroll bar is unintuitive. It took until a couple of days ago to discover either scroll bar, and when I found them the natural action was to click on the pointed ends, rather than dragging, but this had no effect.
Of course it would be much easier to learn how it worked if the graph could respond continuously
during a click-and-drag; if this is impossible maybe a rectangular that appeared around the pointer could do?
Quite unrelatedly, the font displays really badly on this Windows XP machine. In Firefox horizontal text is illegible, in Chrome the vertical axis label is.