A Survey of Visualization Construction User Interfaces

Abstract

We have systematically surveyed the publications on visualization construction user interfaces that have been published in 12 major Visualization and HCI venues. We found six different visualization construction approaches (visual builder, visualization spreadsheet, textual programming, visual dataflow programming, template editor, and shelf configuration). The approaches differ in their flexibility, whether they support presentation or exploration tasks, and the spatial, temporal, and conceptual distance between the user interface (UI) and the visualization. Our results provide guidance to designers of visualization construction UIs.