Intents, Techniques, and Components: a Unified Analysis of Interaction Authoring Tasks in Data Visualization

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive framework analyzing interaction authoring in data visualization, focusing on intents, techniques, and components to improve tool design and understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a unified analysis framework for interaction authoring tasks, bridging the gap between usage and composition of interactivity in visualization tools.

Findings

Analyzed 592 interaction units from 47 visualization applications.

Developed a three-level framework: intents, techniques, components.

Framework aids in critiquing and designing visualization interaction tools.

Abstract

There is a growing interest in designing tools to support interactivity specification and authoring in data visualization. To develop expressive and flexible tools, we need theories and models that describe the task space of interaction authoring. Although multiple taxonomies and frameworks exist for interactive visualization, they primarily focus on how visualizations are used, not how interactivity is composed. To fill this gap, we conduct an analysis of 592 interaction units from 47 real-world visualization applications. Based on the analysis, we present a unified analysis of interaction authoring tasks across three levels of description: intents, representative techniques, and low-level implementation components. We examine our framework's descriptive, evaluative, and generative powers for critiquing existing interactivity authoring tools and informing new tool development.