Exploring D3 Implementation Challenges on Stack Overflow
This work addresses the problem of understanding real-world implementation challenges for D3 users, though it is incremental as it builds on existing analysis of online forums.
The paper analyzes D3 users' implementation workflows and challenges on Stack Overflow, revealing that the visualization community may overlook broader contextual issues in using languages like D3, and suggests new research directions to improve user experience.
Visualization languages help to standardize the process of designing effective visualizations, one of the most prominent being D3. However, few researchers have analyzed at scale how users incorporate these languages into existing visualization programming processes, i.e., implementation workflows. In this paper, we present an analysis of the experiences of D3 users as observed through Stack Overflow, summarizing common D3 implementation workflows and challenges discussed online. Our results show how the visualization community may be limiting its understanding of users' visualization implementation challenges by ignoring the larger context in which languages such as D3 are used. Based on our findings, we suggest new research directions to enhance the user experience with visualization languages. All our data and code are available at: https://osf.io/fup48/.