Peitong Duan

Peitong Duan, Casimir Wierzynski, Lama Nachman

Automating parts of the user interface (UI) design process has been a longstanding challenge. We present an automated technique for optimizing the layouts of mobile UIs. Our method uses gradient descent on a neural network model of task performance with respect to the model's inputs to make layout modifications that result in improved predicted error rates and task completion times. We start by extending prior work on neural network based performance prediction to 2-dimensional mobile UIs with an expanded interaction space. We then apply our method to two UIs, including one that the model had not been trained on, to discover layout alternatives with significantly improved predicted performance. Finally, we confirm these predictions experimentally, showing improvements up to 9.2 percent in the optimized layouts. This demonstrates the algorithm's efficacy in improving the task performance of a layout, and its ability to generalize and improve layouts of new interfaces.

Leilani Battle, Peitong Duan, Zachery Miranda et al.

"How common is interactive visualization on the web?" "What is the most popular visualization design?" "How prevalent are pie charts really?" These questions intimate the role of interactive visualization in the real (online) world. In this paper, we present our approach (and findings) to answering these questions. First, we introduce Beagle, which mines the web for SVG-based visualizations and automatically classifies them by type (i.e., bar, pie, etc.). With Beagle, we extract over 41,000 visualizations across five different tools and repositories, and classify them with 86% accuracy, across 24 visualization types. Given this visualization collection, we study usage across tools. We find that most visualizations fall under four types: bar charts, line charts, scatter charts, and geographic maps. Though controversial, pie charts are relatively rare in practice. Our findings also indicate that users may prefer tools that emphasize a succinct set of visualization types, and provide diverse expert visualization examples.