iVoLVER

Abstract

Previous research has identified trade-offs when it comes to designing visualization tools. While constructive "bottomup" tools promote a hands-on, user-driven design process that enables a deep understanding and control of the visual mapping, automated tools are more efficient and allow people to rapidly explore complex alternative designs, often at the cost of transparency. We investigate how to design visualization tools that support a user-driven, transparent design process while enabling efficiency and automation, through a series of design workshops that looked at how both visualization experts and novices approach this problem. Participants produced a variety of solutions that range from example-based approaches expanding constructive visualization to solutions in which the visualization tool infers solutions on behalf of the designer, e.g., based on data attributes. On a higher level, these findings highlight agency and granularity as dimensions that can guide the design of visualization tools in this space.

Critical Reflections on Visualization Authoring Systems

“…Finally, another class of interactive systems can be described as visual builders, and our three systems are members of this class, along with systems such as iVisDesigner [33], iVolver [26], InfoNice [45], Data-Driven Guides [15], DataInk [50], and VisComposer [23]. Though their interfaces tend to be more complicated than those of template-and shelf-based systems, visual builders provide authors with fine control in specifying marks, glyphs, coordinate systems, and layouts.…”

Bottom-up vs. Top-down

“…The graph of connected components defines the dataflow and the characteristics of the visualization. This approach has a long history (e.g., [1,29]) but is also present in more recent tools such as ExPlates [27], DataMeadow [16], and iVoLVER [31].…”

“…The final visualization emerges as the result of many small-scale decisions and manipulations. As representative of this approach we selected iVoLVER [31], the Interactive Visual Language for Visualization Extraction and Reconstruction, because it is digital as Tableau Desktop and the code is recent, open, and available on-line. 2 iVoLVER is based on an infinite zoomable canvas interface.…”

Visualizing for the Non‐Visual: Enabling the Visually Impaired to Use Visualization

“…Software packages exist that extract information from certain charts [Roh11, Tum06]. iVoLVER [MNV16] extracts data from existing raster chart images and generates interactive animated visualization. Saava et al developed a system called ReVision, to classify images of charts into five categories and extract data from bar charts and pie charts [SKC * 11].…”