VisAhoi: Towards a Library to Generate and Integrate Visualization Onboarding Using High-level Visualization Grammars

TL;DR

VisAhoi is a library designed to facilitate visualization onboarding by supporting the creation, integration, and customization of onboarding elements across various visualization types and datasets using high-level visualization grammars.

Contribution

This paper introduces VisAhoi, a novel onboarding library that is easy to extend, semi-automate, and adaptable for different visualization tools and datasets.

Findings

Successfully integrated into VA tools for high-throughput screening analysis.

Implemented as a template for data journalists using Flourish.

Demonstrated applicability across diverse visualization types.

Abstract

Visualization onboarding supports users in reading, interpreting, and extracting information from visual data representations. General-purpose onboarding tools and libraries are applicable for explaining a wide range of graphical user interfaces but cannot handle specific visualization requirements. This paper describes a first step towards developing an onboarding library called VisAhoi, which is easy to integrate, extend, semi-automate, reuse, and customize. VisAhoi supports the creation of onboarding elements for different visualization types and datasets. We demonstrate how to extract and describe onboarding instructions using three well-known high-level descriptive visualization grammars - Vega-Lite, Plotly.js, and ECharts. We show the applicability of our library by performing two usage scenarios that describe the integration of VisAhoi into a VA tool for the analysis of high-throughput screening (HTS) data and, second, into a Flourish template to provide an authoring tool for data journalists for a treemap visualization. We provide a supplementary website that demonstrates the applicability of VisAhoi to various visualizations, including a bar chart, a horizon graph, a change matrix or heatmap, a scatterplot, and a treemap visualization.