Falx: Synthesis-Powered Visualization Authoring

TL;DR

Falx is a visualization tool that uses synthesis to automatically infer visualization specifications and transform data, enabling users to create complex visualizations without manual data layout adjustments.

Contribution

Falx introduces a synthesis-based approach allowing users to specify visualizations via examples, automating data transformation and visualization inference.

Findings

Users effectively adopted Falx for complex visualizations.

Falx reduced manual data transformation effort.

Participants successfully created visualizations otherwise difficult to implement.

Abstract

Modern visualization tools aim to allow data analysts to easily create exploratory visualizations. When the input data layout conforms to the visualization design, users can easily specify visualizations by mapping data columns to visual channels of the design. However, when there is a mismatch between data layout and the design, users need to spend significant effort on data transformation. We propose Falx, a synthesis-powered visualization tool that allows users to specify visualizations in a similarly simple way but without needing to worry about data layout. In Falx, users specify visualizations using examples of how concrete values in the input are mapped to visual channels, and Falx automatically infers the visualization specification and transforms the data to match the design. In a study with 33 data analysts on four visualization tasks involving data transformation, we found that users can effectively adopt Falx to create visualizations they otherwise cannot implement.