A cloud platform records a wealth of information regarding program execution. Most cloud service providers offer dashboard monitoring tools that visualize resource usage and billing information, and support debugging. In this paper, we present a tool that visualizes cloud execution logs for a different goal - to facilitate program understanding and generate documentations for an application using runtime data. Our tool introduces a new timeline visualization, a new method and user interface to summarize multiple JSON objects and present the result, and interaction techniques that facilitate navigating among functions. Together, these features explain a serverless cloud application's composition, performance, dataflow and data schema. We report some initial user feedback from several expert developers that were involved in the tool's design and development process.

More and more data nowadays exist in hierarchical formats such as JSON due to the increasing popularity of web applications and web services. While many end-user systems support getting hierarchical data from databases without programming, they provide very little support for using hierarchical data beyond turning the data into a flat string or table. In this paper, we present a spreadsheet tool for using and exploring hierarchical datasets. We introduce novel interaction techniques and algorithms to manipulate and visualize hierarchical data in a spreadsheet using the data's relative hierarchical relationships with the data in its adjacent columns. Our tool leverages the data's structural information to support selecting, grouping, joining, sorting and filtering hierarchical data in spreadsheets. Our lab study showed that our tool helped spreadsheet users complete data exploration tasks nearly two times faster than using Excel and even outperform programmers in most tasks.

We present a spreadsheet model for working with streaming data. Our prototype tool presents techniques to let the user stream data from web services and web input elements to a spreadsheet without preprogramming those sources into the tool. Spreadsheet cells record metadata about where and when the data came from, allowing the user to view and manipulate streaming data using temporal information. Starting and pausing a data stream in the spreadsheet can be controlled programmatically using values computed by spreadsheet cells, making the spreadsheet program highly dynamic and interactive. We demonstrate the range of our design with a series of examples highlighting its ability to create different kinds of applications that process real-time data from the web using simple spreadsheet formulas.

The Internet has all kinds of data available. Many companies provide Web services that let people access their data programmatically. These data are used every day by thousands of businesses and individuals to create custom applications or to gain insights about specific topics1. The increasing use of Web services has led to the increasing amount of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data, the predominant data format used by current Web services. JSON data is hierarchical and can contain multiple levels of structure. Currently, a person needs to write code to extract and compute data from JSON documents. To retrieve data from Web services and to create custom applications that use the collected data require additional programming efforts.

In this paper, we explore using large digital displays in combination with a personal mobile application to publicly and privately encourage people to make healthy choices. We designed, built, and deployed an experimental system called Lunch Line that promoted healthy eating. Lunch Line includes a public display that enables passersby to view the reported eating behavior of a group of people and take on daily "food challenges," and a mobile web application that allows users to record personal food choices, report challenge achievement, and compare their choices with other users and with USDA recommendations. Results from a 3-week field evaluation at a company cafeteria showed that our integrated system was effective in drawing public attention, delivering challenges, enabling self-tracking and self-reflection, and providing feedback on personal and group choices. We share lessons on how to design future systems that integrate situated public displays and personal mobile devices to encourage healthy choices.

While more and more data are available through web services, it remains difficult for end-users to create web applications that make use of these data without having to write complex code. We present Gneiss, a live programming environment that extends the spreadsheet metaphor to support creating interactive web applications that dynamically use local or web data from multiple sources. Gneiss closely integrates a spreadsheet editor with a web interface builder to let users demonstrate bindings between properties of web GUI elements and cells in the spreadsheet while working with real web service data. The spreadsheet editor provides two-way connections to web services, to both visualize and retrieve different data based on the user input in the web interface. Gneiss achieves rich interactivity without the need for event-based programming by extending the 'pull model' of formulas that is familiar to the spreadsheet users. We use a series of examples to demonstrate Gneiss's ability to create a variety of interactive web data applications.

Web services offer a more reliable and efficient way to access online data than scraping web pages. However, web service data are often in complex hierarchical structures that make it difficult for people to extract the desired parts or to perform any further data manipulation without writing a significant amount of surprisingly intricate code. In this paper, we present Gneiss, a tool that extends the familiar spreadsheet metaphor to support working with data returned from web services. Gneiss allows users to extract the desired fields in web service data using drag-and-drop, and refine the results through spreadsheet formulas, along with sorting and filtering the data. Hierarchical data are stored as nested tables in the spreadsheet and can be flattened for future operations. Data flow is two-way between the spreadsheet and the web services, enabling people to easily make a new request by modifying spreadsheet cells. In addition, using the dependency between spreadsheet cells, our tool is able to create parallel-running data extractions based on the user's sequential demonstration. We use a set of examples to demonstrate our tool's ability to create fast and reusable data extraction and manipulation programs that work with complex web service data.

Structure makes data more useful, but also makes data entry more cumbersome. Studies have found that this is especially true on mobile devices, as mobile users often reject structured personal information management tools because the structure is too restrictive and makes entering data slower. To overcome these problems, we introduce a new data entry technique that lets users create customized structured data in an unstructured manner. We use a novel notepad-like editing interface with built-in data detectors that allow users to specify structured data implicitly and reuse the structures when desired. To minimize the amount of typing, it provides intelligent, context-sensitive autocomplete suggestions using personal and public databases that contain candidate information to be entered. We implemented these mechanisms in an example application called Listpad. Our evaluation shows that people using Listpad create customized structured data 16% faster than using a conventional mobile database tool. The speed further increases to 42% when the fields can be autocompleted.

A key use for mobile devices is to search and view online information while on the go. As a result, many mobile applications serve as front ends for online databases. While there are many thousands of data sources that provide web service APIs giving access to their databases, creating mobile applications to use those sources requires significant mobile programming knowledge and a significant amount of time. We introduce Spinel, a plug-in architecture for Android, and a set of web-based configuration tools that together enable users to connect mobile applications to new data sources without programming. Spinel also provides APIs that make it easy for developers to create new applications that use those data sources. We provide three demonstration Android applications that use such data: Listpad for entering personal lists, Listviewer for viewing results of data queries, and Mapviewer for displaying query results on a map. An informal usability study showed that users could successfully attach new data sources to those applications.

Examples have been widely used in the area of web design to help web authors create web pages. However, without actually understanding how an example is constructed, people often have trouble extracting the elements they want and incorporating them into their own design. This paper introduces WebCrystal, a web development tool that helps users understand how a web page is built. WebCrystal contributes novel interaction techniques that let the user quickly access HTML and CSS information by selecting questions regarding how a selected element is designed. It provides answers using a textual description and a customized code snippet that can be copied-and-pasted to recreate the desired properties. WebCrystal also supports combining the styles and structures from multiple elements into the generated code snippet, and provides visualizations on the web page itself to explain layout relationships. Our user study shows that WebCrystal helped both novice and experienced developers complete more tasks successfully using significantly less time.