EvalBench, an easy-to-use, flexible, and reusable software library written in Java that reliefs much of the burden of evaluation feature implementation from visualization developers and makes conducting user studies much easier. It can be used and integrated with third-party visualization prototypes that need to be evaluated via loose coupling. Further advantages are better reproducibility as well as the increased reliability and precision of built-in and automated evaluation features compared to external methods for measurement. EvalBench supports both, quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods such as controlled experiments, interaction logging, questionnaires, usability inspections, and insight diaries.
EvalBench is licensed under the terms of a BSD 2-clause license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes (see LICENSE).
The source of a demo application showing the library in use is included.
To start the evaluation, select the "Evaluation" menu in the menu bar and select "Start evaluation".
The demo is also available as an executable JAR file (unzip first).
The library distribution uses the following organization:
+ EvalBench |-- lib Third-party libraries needed by EvalBench |-- evaluationJournal Output files that arise during an evaluation |-- src The source code for the EvalBench library |-- src_demo The source code of demo applications showing the library in use |-- xml Example task lists and other data files
EvalBench is written in Java 1.6. To compile the EvalBench code, and to build and run evaluation systems, you'll need a copy of the Java Development Kit (JDK) for version 1.6 or greater.
The library depends on the following packages:
- Apache Commons Lang 3 classes: http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-lang/
- Apache logging library log4j 1.2: http://logging.apache.org/log4j/1.2/
- JCalendar 1.4 by Kai Toedter: http://www.toedter.com/en/jcalendar/
- ieg-util, general Java utilities by IEG: https://github.com/ieg-vienna/ieg-util
We also recommended (though by no means is it required) that you use an Integrated Development Environment such as Eclipse (http://eclipse.org). Especially if you are a Java novice, it will likely make your life much easier.
Wolfgang Aigner, Stephan Hoffmann, and Alexander Rind,
EvalBench: A Software Library for Visualization Evaluation,
Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 32, no. 3, p. 41-50, 2013.