Spot-tracking lens: A zoomable user interface for animated bubble charts

Zoomable user interfaces are widely used in static visualizations and have many benefits. However, they are not well supported in animated visualizations due to problems such as change blindness and information overload. We propose the spot-tracking lens, a new zoomable user interface for animated bubble charts, to tackle these problems. It couples zooming with automatic panning and provides a rich set of auxiliary techniques to enhance its effectiveness. Our preliminary user studies suggested that, besides allowing users to examine detail information, it can be an engaging approach to exploratory analysis for dynamic data.