Study of Multiple View Layout Strategies in Visualisation

Multiple views is a popular strategy in information visualisation,but for many years researchers have asked questions such as “howmany views and what layout strategies do people use?” Answer-ing these questions would help developers create suitable multiple-view systems, but to date there has been little research into thesequestions. In this short paper, we present initial results of a largerongoing study looking at how multiple-views are used. For thisstudy, we built a database of images containing screenshots of vi-sualisation tools from articles presented at IEEE VIS from 2012 to2017. We select suitable images across TVCG journal, conference,posters and workshop papers. We closely evaluate the layout of 340images of multiple-view systems and consider the layout topologyof each image. Our results show that in the past six years, develop-ers use on average (just over) four views.