Visual data analysis involves both open-ended and focused exploration. Manual chart specification tools support question answering, but are often tedious for early-stage exploration where systematic data coverage is needed. Visualization recommenders can encourage broad coverage, but irrelevant suggestions may distract users once they commit to specific questions. We present Voyager 2, a mixed-initiative system that blends manual and automated chart specification to help analysts engage in both open-ended exploration and targeted question answering. We contribute two partial specification interfaces: wildcards let users specify multiple charts in parallel, while related views suggest visualizations relevant to the currently specified chart. We present our interface design and applications of the CompassQL visualization query language to enable these interfaces. In a controlled study we find that Voyager 2 leads to increased data field coverage compared to a traditional specification tool, while still allowing analysts to flexibly drill-down and answer specific questions.

Spreadsheets are a critical and widely-used data management tool. Converting spreadsheet data into relational tables would bring benefits to a number of fields, including public policy, public health, and economics. Research to date has focused on designing domain-specific languages to describe transformation processes or automatically converting a specific type of spreadsheets. To handle a larger variety of spreadsheets, we have to identify various spreadsheet properties, which correspond to a series of transformation programs that contribute towards a general framework that converts spreadsheets to relational tables.

General visualization tools typically require manual specification of views: analysts must select data variables and then choose which transformations and visual encodings to apply. These decisions often involve both domain and visualization design expertise, and may impose a tedious specification process that impedes exploration. In this paper, we seek to complement manual chart construction with interactive navigation of a gallery of automatically-generated visualizations. We contribute Voyager, a mixed-initiative system that supports faceted browsing of recommended charts chosen according to statistical and perceptual measures. We describe Voyager's architecture, motivating design principles, and methods for generating and interacting with visualization recommendations. In a study comparing Voyager to a manual visualization specification tool, we find that Voyager facilitates exploration of previously unseen data and leads to increased data variable coverage. We then distill design implications for visualization tools, in particular the need to balance rapid exploration and targeted question-answering.

Authors use icon encodings to indicate the semantics of categorical information in visualizations. The default icon libraries found in visualization tools often do not match the semantics of the data. Users often manually search for or create icons that are more semantically meaningful. This process can hinder the flow of visual analysis, especially when the amount of data is large, leading to a suboptimal user experience. We propose a technique for automatically generating semantically relevant icon encodings for categorical dimensions of data points. The algorithm employs natural language processing in order to find relevant imagery from the Internet. We evaluate our approach on Mechanical Turk by generating large libraries of icons using Tableau Public workbooks that represent real analytical effort by people out in the world. Our results show that the automatic algorithm does nearly as well as the manually created icons, and particularly has higher user satisfaction for larger cardinalities of data.

We present a vision of next-generation visual analytics services. We argue that these services should have three related capabilities: support visual and interactive data exploration as they do today, but also suggest relevant data to enrich visualizations, and facilitate the integration and cleaning of that data. Most importantly, they should provide all these capabilities seamlessly in the context of an uninterrupted data analysis cycle. We present the challenges and opportunities in building next-generation visual analytics services.

Tableau is a commercial business intelligence (BI) software tool that supports interactive, visual analysis of data. Armed with a visual interface to data and a focus on usability, Tableau enables a wide audience of end-users to gain insight into their datasets. The user experience is a fluid process of interaction in which exploring and visualizing data takes just a few simple drag-and-drop operations (no programming or DB experience necessary). In this context of exploratory, ad-hoc visual analysis, we describe a novel approach to integrating large, heterogeneous data sources. We present a new feature in Tableau called data blending, which gives users the ability to create data visualization mashups from structured, heterogeneous data sources dynamically without any upfront integration effort. Users can author visualizations that automatically integrate data from a variety of sources, including data warehouses, data marts, text files, spreadsheets, and data cubes. Because our data blending system is workload driven, we are able to bypass many of the pain-points and uncertainty in creating mediated schemas and schema-mappings in current pay-as-you-go integration systems.

Interactive history tools, ranging from basic undo and redo to branching timelines of user actions, facilitate iterative forms of interaction. In this paper, we investigate the design of history mechanisms for information visualization. We present a design space analysis of both architectural and interface issues, identifying design decisions and associated trade-offs. Based on this analysis, we contribute a design study of graphical history tools for Tableau, a database visualization system. These tools record and visualize interaction histories, support data analysis and communication of findings, and contribute novel mechanisms for presenting, managing, and exporting histories. Furthermore, we have analyzed aggregated collections of history sessions to evaluate Tableau usage. We describe additional tools for analyzing users' history logs and how they have been applied to study usage patterns in Tableau.

This paper describes Show Me, an integrated set of user interface commands and defaults that incorporate automatic presentation into a commercial visual analysis system called Tableau. A key aspect of Tableau is VizQL, a language for specifying views, which is used by Show Me to extend automatic presentation to the generation of tables of views (commonly called small multiple displays). A key research issue for the commercial application of automatic presentation is the user experience, which must support the flow of visual analysis. User experience has not been the focus of previous research on automatic presentation. The Show Me user experience includes the automatic selection of mark types, a command to add a single field to a view, and a pair of commands to build views for multiple fields. Although the use of these defaults and commands is optional, user interface logs indicate that Show Me is used by commercial users.

This paper describes the 3Book, a 3D interactive visualization of a codex book as a component for various digital library and sensemaking systems. The book is designed to hold large books and to support sensemaking operations by readers. The book includes methods in which the automatic semantic analysis of the book's content is used to dynamically tailor access.

The Fluid Documents project has developed various research prototypes that show that powerful annotation techniques based on animated typographical changes can help readers utilize annotations more effectively. Our recently-developed Fluid Open Hypermedia prototype supports the authoring and browsing of fluid annotations on third-party Web pages. This prototype is an extension of the Arakne Environment, an open hypermedia application that can augment Web pages with externally stored hypermedia structures. This paper describes how various Web standards, including DOM, CSS, XLink, XPointer, and RDF, can be used and extended to support fluid annotations.

Fluid Documents incorporate additional information into a page by adjusting typography using interactive animation. One application is to support hypertext browsing by providing glosses for link anchors. This paper describes an observational study of the impact of Fluid Documents on reading and browsing. The study involved six conditions that differ along several dimensions, including the degree of typographic adjustment and the distance glosses are placed from anchors. Six subjects read and answered questions about two hypertext corpora while being monitored by an eyetracker. The eyetracking data revealed no substantial differenccs in eye behavior between conditions. Gloss placement was significant: subjects required less time to use nearby glosses. Finally, the reaction to the conditions was highly varied, with several conditions receiving both a best and worst rating on the subjective questionnaires. These results suggest implications for the design of dynamic reading environments.

Several visualizations have emerged which attempt to visualize all or part of the World Wide Web.Those visualizations, however, fail to present the dynamically changing ecology of users and documents on the Web.We present new techniques for Web Ecology and Evolution Visualization (WEEV).Disk Trees represent a discrete time slice of the Web ecology.A collection of Disk Trees forms a Time Tube, representing the evolution of the Web over longer periods of time.These visualizations are intended to aid authors and webmasters with the production and organization of content, assist Web surfers making sense of information, and help researchers understand the Web.

The information presented in a document often consists of primary content as well as supporting material such as explanatory notes, detailed derivations, illustrations, and the like.We introduce a class of user interface techniques for fluid documents that supports the reader's shift to supporting material while maintaining the context of the primary material.Our approach initially minimizes the intrusion of supporting material by presenting it as a small visual cue near the annotated primary material.When the user expresses interest in the annotation, it expands smoothly to a readable size.At the same time, the primary material makes space for the expanded annotation.The expanded supporting material must be given space to occupy, and it must be made salient with respect to the surrounding primary material.These two aspects, space and salience, are subject to a negotiation between the primary and supporting material.This paper presents the components of our fluid document techniques and describes the negotiation architecture for ensuring that the presentations of both primary and supporting material are honored.

The conference this year is the tenth anniversary of UIST.The keynote talk discusses the history of UIST over the last ten years; this panel looks into the future of the field over the next ten.Each of the panelists will describe a scenario for what life will be like when we meet for UIST'O'I, ten years from now.They will also have a chance to challenge or question each others' scenarios and to participate in open discussion with the audience.

This paper describes Butterfly, an Information Visualizer application for accessing DIALOG'S Science Citation databases across the Internet.Network information often involves slow access that conflicts with the use of highly-interactive information visualization.Butterfly addresses this problem, integrating search, browsing, and access management via four techniques: 1) visualization supports the assimilation of retrieved information and integrates search and browsing activity, 2) automatically-created "link-generating" queries assemble bibliographic records that contain reference information into citation graphs, 3) asynchronous query processes explore the resulting graphs for the user, and 4) process controllers allow the user to manage these processes.We use our positive experience with the Butterfly implementation to propose a general information access approach, called Organic User Inteifacesfor Infomiation Access, in which a virtual landscape grows under user control as information is accessed automatically.

In this paper we present a method, the Cost-of-Knowledge Characteristic Function, for characterizing information access from dynamic displays.The paper works out this method for a simple, but important, class of dynamic displays called direct-walk interactive information visuatizations, in which information is accessed through a sequence of mouse selections and key selections.The method is used to characterize a simple calendar task for an application of the Information Visualizer, to compute the changes in characterization as the result of possible program variants, and to conduct empirical comparison between different systems with the same function.

The increasing mass of information confronting a business or an individual have created a demand for information management applications. Time-based information, in particular, is an important part of many information access tasks. This paper explores how to use 3D graphics and interactive animation to design and implement visualizers that improve access to large masses of time-based information. Two new visualizers have been developed for the Information Visualizer: 1) the Spiral Calendar was designed for rapid access to an individual's daily schedule, and 2) the Time Lattice was designed for analyzing the time relationships among the schedules of groups of people. The Spiral Calendar embodies a new 3D graphics technique for integrating detail and context by placing objects in a 3D spiral. It demonstrates that advanced graphics techniques can enhance routine office information tasks. The Time Lattice is formed by aligning a collection of 2D calendars. 2D translucent shadows provide views and interactive access to the resulting complex 3D object. The paper focuses on how these visualizations were developed. The Spiral Calendar, in particular, has gone through an entire cycle of development, including design, implementation, evaluation, revision and reuse. Our experience should prove useful to others developing user interfaces based on advanced graphics.

Current information retrieval interfaces only address a small pant of the reality of rich interactions amongst user, task, and information sources.We view information gathering as an interactive, iterative activity involving multiple disparate information sources and embedded in the context of broader processes of information use.We have developed two key system components that enable information workspaces that adhere to this reformulation of information retrieval.The tlrst is a design for a user/system interaction model for retrieval from multiple, disparate information sources.The second is a repository modeling system, called Repo, that represents meta-information about different information repositories in a manner that supports system operation as well as provides a direct information resource to the user.To test these embodied the interaction system called Labrador.

This paper describes a general visualization techniquebased on a common strategy for understanding paper documents when their structure is not known, whiclh is to lay the pages of a document in a rectangular array on a large table where the overall structure and distinguishing features can be seen.Given such a presentation, the user wants to quickly view parts of the presentation in detail while remaining in context.A fisheye view or a magnifying lens might be used for this, but they fail to adequately show the global context. The DocumentLens is a 3D visualization for large rectangular presentations that allows the user to quickly focus on a part of a presentation while continuously remaining in context.The user grabs a rectangular lens and pulls it around to focus on the desired area at the desired magnification.The presentation outside the lens is stretched to provide a continuous display of the global context.This stretching is efficiently implemented with affine transformations, allowing text documents to be viewed as a whole with an interactive visualization.

The Information Grid (InfoGrid) is a framework for building information access applications that provides a user interface design and an interaction model. It focuses on retrieval of application objects as its top level mechanism for accessing user information, documents, or services. We have embodied the InfoGrid design in an object-oriented application framework that supports rapid construction of applications. This application framework has been used to build a number of applications, some that are classically characterized as information retrieval applications, others that are more typically viewed as personal work tools.

Article The information visualizer, an information workspace Share on Authors: Stuart K. Card Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, California Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CaliforniaView Profile , George G. Robertson Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, California Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CaliforniaView Profile , Jock D. Mackinlay Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, California Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CaliforniaView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '91: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 1991 Pages 181–186https://doi.org/10.1145/108844.108874Online:01 March 1991Publication History 367citation3,492DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations367Total Downloads3,492Last 12 Months153Last 6 weeks18 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Tasks that involve large information spaces overwhelm workspaces that do not support efiicient use of space and time. For example, case studies indicate that information often contains linear components, which can result in 2D layouts with wide, inefficient aspect ratios. This paper describes a technique called the Perspective W’aU for visualizing linear information by smoothly integrating detailed and contextual views. It uses hardware support for 3D interactive animation to fold wide 2D layouts into intuitive 3D visualizations that have a center panel for detail and two perspective panels for context. The resulting visualization supports efficient use of space and time.

No abstract available.

The task of managing and accessing large information spaces is a problem in large scale cognition.Enwrging technologies for 3D visualization and interactive aninlaiion offer potential solutions to this problenl, especially when the structure of the information can be visualized.We describe one of these Information Visualtzaiion techniques, called the Cone Tree, which is used for visualizing hierarchical information structures.The hierarchy is presented in 3D to nlaxilnize effective use of available screen space and enable visualization of the whole structure.Interactive aninlation is used (,o shift sonle of the user's cognitive load to the human perceptual system,

No abstract available.

The market now contains a bewildering variety of input devices for communication from humans to computers.This paper discusses a means to systematize these devices through morphological design space analysis, in which different input device designs are taken as points in a parametrically described design space.The design space is characterized by finding methods to generate and test design points.In a previous paper, we discussed a method for generating the space of input device designs using primitive and compositional movement operators.This allowed us to propose a taxonomy of input devices.In this paper, we summarize the generation method and explore the use of device footprint and Fitts's law as a test.We then use calculations to reason about the design space.Calculations are used to show why the mouse is a more effective device than the headmouse and where in the design space there is likely to be a more effective device than the mouse.

A bewildering variety of devices for communication from humans to computers now exists on the market. In order to make sense of this variety, and to aid in the design of new input devices, we propose a framework for describing and analyzing input devices. Following Mackinlay's semantic analysis of the design space for graphical presentations, our goal is to provide tools for the generation and test of input device designs. The descriptive tools we have created allow us to describe the semantics of a device and measure its expressiveness. Using these tools, we have built a taxonomy of input devices that goes beyond earlier taxonomies of Buxton & Baecker and Foley, Wallace, & Chan. In this paper, we build on these descriptive tools, and proceed to the use of human performance theories and data for evaluation of the effectiveness of points in this design space. We focus on two figures of merit, footprint and bandwidth, to illustrate this evaluation. The result is the systematic integration of methods for both generating and testing the design space of input devices.

Computer graphics hardware supporting real-time interactive 3D animation has the potential to support effective user interfaces by enabling virtual 3D workspaces. However, this potential requires development of viewpoint movement techniques that support rapid and controlled movement through workspaces. Rapid movement through large distances avoids wasted work time; controlled movement near target objects allows the user to examine and interact with objects in the workspace. Current techniques for viewpoint movement typically use high velocities to cover distances rapidly, but high velocities are hard to control near objects. This paper describes a new technique for targeted viewpoint movement that solves this problem. The key idea is to have the user indicate a point of interest (target) on a 3D object and use the distance to this target to move the viewpoint logarithmically, by moving the same relative percentage of distance to the target on every animation cycle. the result is rapid motion over distances that slows as the viewpoint approaches the target object. The technique can be used with 2D and multidimensional input devices. We also extend the technique to move objects in the workspace.

A bewildering variety of devices for communication from humans to computers now exists on the market. In this article, we propose a descriptive framework for analyzing the design space of these input devices. We begin with Buxton's (1983) idea that input devices are transducers of physical properties in one, two, or three dimensions. Following Mackinlay's semantic analysis of the design space for graphical presentations, we extend this idea to more comprehensive descriptions of physical properties, space, and transducer mappings. In our reformulation, input devices are transducers of any combination of linear and rotary, absolute and relative, position and force, in any of the six spatial degrees of freedom. Simple input devices are described in terms of semantic mappings from the transducers of physical properties into the parameters of the applications. One of these mappings, the resolution function, allows us to describe the range of possibilities from continuous devices to discrete devices, including possibilities in between. Complex input controls are described in terms of hierarchical families of generic devices and in terms of composition operators on simpler devices. The description that emerges is used to produce a new taxonomy of input devices. The taxonomy is compared with previous taxonomies of Foley, Wallace, and Chan (1984) and of Buxton (1983) by reclassifying the devices previously analyzed by these authors. The descriptive techniques are further applied to the design of complex mouse-based virtual input controls for simulated three-dimensional (3D) egocentric motion. One result is the design of a new virtual egocentric motion control.

The graphics capabilities and speed of current hardware systems allow the exploration of 3D and animation in user interfaces, while improving the degree of interaction as well. In order to fully utilize these capabilities, new software architectures must support multiple, asynchronous, interacting agents (the Multiple Agent Problem), and support smooth interactive animation (the Animation Problem). The Cognitive Coprocessor is a new user interface architecture designed to solve these two problems, while supporting highly interactive user interfaces that have 2D and 3D animations. This architecture includes 3D Rooms, a 3D analogy to the Rooms system with Rooms Buttons extended to Interactive Objects that deal with 3D, animation, and gestures. This research is being tested in the domain of Information Visualization, which uses 2D and 3D animated artifacts to represent the structure of information. A prototype, called the Information Visualizer, has been built.

The increasing availability of computers with high-quality graphics and fonts has created an opportunity and an obligation for user interface designers. The opportunity is that designers can use graphical techniques to design more effective user interfaces. The obligation is that they must become experts at the design of graphical user interfaces. Current user interface toolkits provide very little design assistance. This paper describes a theory that supports automatic design of graphical presentations of relational information and shows how to extend it to support theory-driven design of graphical user interfaces.

The goal of the research described in this paper is to develop an application-independent presentation tool that automatically designs effective graphical presentations (such as bar charts, scatter plots, and connected graphs) of relational information. Two problems are raised by this goal: The codification of graphic design criteria in a form that can be used by the presentation tool, and the generation of a wide variety of designs so that the presentation tool can accommodate a wide variety of information. The approach described in this paper is based on the view that graphical presentations are sentences of graphical languages. The graphic design issues are codified as expressiveness and effectiveness criteria for graphical languages. Expressiveness criteria determine whether a graphical language can express the desired information. Effectiveness criteria determine whether a graphical language exploits the capabilities of the output medium and the human visual system. A wide variety of designs can be systematically generated by using a composition algebra that composes a small set of primitive graphical languages. Artificial intelligence techniques are used to implement a prototype presentation tool called APT (A Presentation Tool), which is based on the composition algebra and the graphic design criteria.