Design of a Visualization Design Environment (VDE)

INTRODUCTION There are many tools for specifying visualizations available today, ranging from easy-to-use programs such as Microsoft Excel [6] and Tableau [9] to powerful graphical toolkits such as D3 [2]. Excel and Tableau make it easy for a user to rapidly generate data visualizations and iteratively explore a dataset, but can be somewhat difficult to use and restrictive with respect to creating a layout and specifying the visual properties of a final visualization. Toolkits such as D3 are flexible and incredibly customizable, but a user must know how to program to leverage their power. This project explores the middle ground between ease of use and flexibility of expression in attempting to create a graphical tool that allows a user to precisely create visualization fluidly and easily. The project makes use of direct manipulation techniques as well as Flowmenus [5] to allow the user to specify the mapping of data to visual properties on the visualization itself. It also provides a property editor to allow the user precise control of the layout and style of the visualization.