Considering Visualization Example Galleries

TL;DR

This paper explores the role, design, and management of visualization example galleries through interviews, revealing their multifaceted nature and offering insights for future tool development.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of gallery creation and usage, highlighting challenges and opportunities for improving gallery curation and support tools.

Findings

Galleries serve multiple purposes including marketing, testing, and documentation.

Different gallery usages influence their design and management strategies.

Diverse galleries facilitate reuse but increase maintenance complexity.

Abstract

Example galleries are often used to teach, document, and advertise visually-focused domain-specific languages and libraries, such as those producing visualizations, diagrams, or webpages. Despite their ubiquity, there is no consensus on the role of "example galleries", let alone what the best practices might be for their creation or curation. To understand gallery meaning and usage, we interviewed the creators (N=11) and users (N=9) of prominent visualization-adjacent tools. From these interviews we synthesized strategies and challenges for gallery curation and management (e.g. weighing the costs/benefits of adding new examples and trade-offs in richness vs ease of use), highlighted the differences between planned and actual gallery usage (e.g. opportunistic reuse vs search-engine optimization), and reflected on parts of the gallery design space not explored (e.g. highlighting the potential of tool assistance). We found that galleries are multi-faceted structures whose form and content are motivated to accommodate different usages--ranging from marketing material to test suite to extended documentation. This work offers a foundation for future support tools by characterizing gallery design and management, as well as by highlighting challenges and opportunities in the space (such as how more diverse galleries make reuse tasks simpler, but complicate upkeep).