Interactive Input and Visualization for Planning with Temporal Uncertainty

When planning series of events or processes, everyone has to cope with temporal uncertainty. Popular examples are holiday planning or train trips. There are several approaches to visualize temporal uncertainty when temporal data and events are already defined, but common research usually does not take uncertainty into account, neither as input nor output. To develop our design, we considered a variety of common approaches for uncertainty visualization and used participatory evaluation to validate our concept. Our design aims at using this uncertainty visualization while sketching the plan interactively. The user may draw and connect a variety of activities using different graphical metaphors as hints for uncertainty. The sketches are immediately interpreted and turned into a visualization to check and validate the resulting plan. To evaluate our new visualization and interactive approach, we conducted a quantitative user study. With an average correctness of 81%, the study shows that the visualization and interaction design work well together and that scheduling plans containing temporal uncertainties can be externalized by the majority of participants without major difficulties.