Development of Visualisation Methods and User Interface for Analysis of Call Flows in Communication Services

Abstract: Abstract With the rapid increase of bandwidth and complexity in the network of communicationsservice providers, there is need for effective troubleshooting to maintain troublefree networks and in turn high customer satisfaction. An important tool in troubleshootingis visualisation of call flows and messages in the network. This thesis setout to compare different charts and user interfaces for the purpose of displaying callflow data in a network for communication services. Two high-fidelity mock-ups weremade for visualising call flows and two for visualising messages. The mock-ups wereevaluated using user-based evaluation and heuristic evaluation. The mock-ups werethen revised based on the information gathered from the evaluations. The result ofthis thesis suggests that an implementation should use a sequence diagram for visualisationof call flows together with a hierarchical view for visualisation of messages. Keywords Call flow, visualisation, user interface, communication services, heuristics, sequencediagram, hierarchical view, table view, tree diagram, mock-up