Cicero: A Declarative Grammar for Responsive Visualization

TL;DR

Cicero is a declarative grammar that simplifies designing responsive visualizations by enabling concise, reusable transformations, facilitating more intelligent and flexible authoring tools for various screen sizes.

Contribution

The paper introduces Cicero, a novel declarative grammar for specifying responsive visualization transformations, allowing for flexible, reusable, and design-agnostic modifications.

Findings

Developed a compiler to an extended Vega-Lite for Cicero

Demonstrated Cicero's ability to encode diverse transformations

Enabled reuse of transformations across visualizations

Abstract

Designing responsive visualizations can be cast as applying transformations to a source view to render it suitable for a different screen size. However, designing responsive visualizations is often tedious as authors must manually apply and reason about candidate transformations. We present Cicero, a declarative grammar for concisely specifying responsive visualization transformations which paves the way for more intelligent responsive visualization authoring tools. Cicero's flexible specifier syntax allows authors to select visualization elements to transform, independent of the source view's structure. Cicero encodes a concise set of actions to encode a diverse set of transformations in both desktop-first and mobile-first design processes. Authors can ultimately reuse design-agnostic transformations across different visualizations. To demonstrate the utility of Cicero, we develop a compiler to an extended version of Vega-Lite, and provide principles for our compiler. We further discuss the incorporation of Cicero into responsive visualization authoring tools, such as a design recommender.