Evaluation of Visualization by Demonstration and Manual View Specification
This work addresses how interaction paradigms affect user experience in visualization tools, which is incremental for researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction and data visualization.
The study compared two visualization tools—Polestar (manual view specification) and VisExemplar (visualization by demonstration)—finding that their interaction paradigms significantly influenced users' construction approaches, goal formation, number of alternatives considered, and sense of control during data exploration.
We present an exploratory study comparing the visualization construction and data exploration processes of people using two visualization tools, each implementing a different interaction paradigm. One of the visualization tools implements the manual view specification paradigm (Polestar) and another implements the visualization by demonstration paradigm (VisExemplar). Findings of our study indicate that the interaction paradigms implemented in these tools influence: 1) approaches used for constructing visualizations, 2) how users form goals, 3) how many visualization alternatives are considered and created, and 4) the feeling of control during the visualization construction process.