VisMaker: a Question-Oriented Visualization Recommender System for Data Exploration
This work addresses the problem of facilitating data visualization creation for users who may lack experience, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing recommender tools.
The authors tackled the challenge of building useful data visualizations by developing VisMaker, a question-oriented visualization recommender system that assists in data exploration, and conducted studies comparing it with Voyager 2 to gather user feedback for tool improvement.
The increasingly rapid growth of data production and the consequent need to explore data to obtain answers to the most varied questions have promoted the development of tools to facilitate the manipulation and construction of data visualizations. However, building useful data visualizations is not a trivial task: it may involve a large number of subtle decisions that require experience from their designer. In this paper, we present VisMaker, a visualization recommender tool that uses a set of rules to present visualization recommendations organized and described through questions, in order to facilitate the understanding of the recommendations and assisting the visual exploration process. We carried out two studies comparing our tool with Voyager 2 and analyzed some aspects of the use of tools. We collected feedback from participants to identify the advantages and disadvantages of our recommendation approach. As a result, we gathered comments to help improve the development of tools in this domain.