Evaluation of Co-located and Distributed Collaborative Visualization

Collaboration is prevalent for network security teams to protect networking environments, yet few network visualization tools are designed for collaborative analysis. With the increasing complexity and volume of dynamic networks, it is important to adopt strategies of joint decision-making through developing collaborative visualization approaches. In this paper, we present a formal user study to evaluate how paired users collaborate under co-located and distributed collaboration environments to tackle the problems of intrusion detection. Ten paired participants are requested to use network visualization patterns to identify attacks existed in the datasets. We observe participants behaviors and collect their performances from the aspects of coordination and communication, which include prioritizing goals and directions, dividing and balancing workloads, and negotiating analysis decisions while maintaining situational awareness. Based on the results, we conclude several coordination strategies and summarize the values of communication for collaborative detection. We also discuss human-related factors in the process of joint decision-making. Our study provides useful information for future design and development of collaborative visualization systems