Ravi Chugh

Andrew McNutt, Ravi Chugh

Interfaces for creating visualizations typically embrace one of several common forms. Textual specification enables fine-grained control, shelf building facilitates rapid exploration, while chart choosing promotes immediacy and simplicity. Ideally these approaches could be unified to integrate the user- and usage-dependent benefits found in each modality, yet these forms remain distinct. We propose parameterized declarative templates, a simple abstraction mechanism over JSON-based visualization grammars, as a foundation for multimodal visualization editors. We demonstrate how templates can facilitate organization and reuse by factoring the more than 160 charts that constitute Vega-Lite's example gallery into approximately 40 templates. We exemplify the pliability of abstracting over charting grammars by implementing -- as a template -- the functionality of the shelf builder Polestar (a simulacra of Tableau) and a set of templates that emulate the Google Sheets chart chooser. We show how templates support multimodal visualization editing by implementing a prototype and evaluating it through an approachability study.

Brian Hempel, Justin Lubin, Ravi Chugh

For creative tasks, programmers face a choice: Use a GUI and sacrifice flexibility, or write code and sacrifice ergonomics? To obtain both flexibility and ease of use, a number of systems have explored a workflow that we call output-directed programming. In this paradigm, direct manipulation of the program's graphical output corresponds to writing code in a general-purpose programming language, and edits not possible with the mouse can still be enacted through ordinary text edits to the program. Such capabilities provide hope for integrating graphical user interfaces into what are currently text-centric programming environments. To further advance this vision, we present a variety of new output-directed techniques that extend the expressive power of Sketch-n-Sketch, an output-directed programming system for creating programs that generate vector graphics. To enable output-directed interaction at more stages of program construction, we expose intermediate execution products for manipulation and we present a mechanism for contextual drawing. Looking forward to output-directed programming beyond vector graphics, we also offer generic refactorings through the GUI, and our techniques employ a domain-agnostic provenance tracing scheme. To demonstrate the improved expressiveness, we implement a dozen new parametric designs in Sketch-n-Sketch without text-based edits. Among these is the first demonstration of building a recursive function in an output-directed programming setting.

Ravi Chugh

Software interfaces today generally fall at either end of a spectrum. On one end are programmable systems, which allow expert users (i.e. programmers) to write software artifacts that describe complex abstractions, but programs are disconnected from their eventual output. On the other end are domain-specific graphical user interfaces (GUIs), which allow end users (i.e. non-programmers) to easily create varied content but present insurmountable walls when a desired feature is not built-in. Both programmatic and direct manipulation have distinct strengths, but users must typically choose one over the other or use some ad-hoc combination of systems. Our goal, put simply, is to bridge this divide. We envision novel software systems that tightly couple programmatic and direct manipulation --- a combination we dub prodirect manipulation --- for a variety of use cases. This will require advances in a broad range of software engineering disciplines, from program analysis and program synthesis technology to user interface design and evaluation. In this extended abstract, we propose two general strategies --- real-time program synthesis and domain-specific synthesis of general-purpose programs --- that may prove fruitful for overcoming the technical challenges. We also discuss metrics that will be important in evaluating the usability and utility of prodirect manipulation systems.