Patterns of Life Visualiations for Intelligence Analysis: Exploring Animation with POLAR

POLAR is a prototype data visualisation system developed for use by Intelligence Analysts conducting Patterns-of-Life (PoL) analysis. PoL analysis involves exploring data to identify behaviour patterns of individuals or groups. POLAR began with a series of requirements interviews with an ex-military analyst. The design process revealed a series of design alternatives that were explored. One of these related to whether, contrary to suggestions in the literature, animation might provide an advantage to the analyst. We report the design of the system and an evaluation study to assess the effect of animation on users. Whilst animation didn't result in significant improvements in performance, the use of animation with trails did result in significantly better usability assessments and higher user-engagement ratings. Post task interviews with analysts suggested where animation might offer a performance advantage.