Visualizing Geographic Data on Mobile Interfaces: The Strategic Use of Colors and Color Intensity as Information Clues

Maps provide people with the ability to visualize and analyze the world as they perceive it, in terms of geographic objects and relationships among them. However, when maps are delivered on mobile devices, where viewing a wide portion of the map may conflict with displaying features in a detailed manner, a complete and exhaustive evaluation of a region may become difficult. In the paper, we describe a visualization technique, named Framy, which exploits an interaction metaphor for painting frames, to provide hints about off-screen objects, in a mobile GIS application. In particular, we explain how Itten’s theory of colors has been taken into account to improve user’s visual perception of items on the mobile device interface.