Show Me: Automatic Presentation for Visual Analysis

TLDR

User experience is a key research issue for commercial automatic presentation, yet it has not been the focus of prior research. The paper introduces Show Me, a set of UI commands and defaults that embed automatic presentation into Tableau. Show Me leverages Tableau’s VizQL to automatically select mark types, add single fields, and build multiple-field views, generating tables of views (small multiples). User interface logs show that commercial users employ Show Me’s optional defaults and commands.

Abstract

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.