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Considering Visualization Example Galleries

Junran Yang, Andrew McNutt, Leilani Battle

TL;DR

The paper investigates the role and best practices of visualization example galleries, noting their varied purposes across marketing, reuse, and testing. It combines a gallery survey of 14 visualization-adjacent galleries with semi-structured interviews of 11 creators and 9 users to identify gallery forms, motivations, and cross-cutting design challenges. The findings reveal that gallery design involves trade-offs in contents, organization, and maintenance, shaped by creator and user goals, with implications for tooling and documentation. The work points to future directions including improved evaluation metrics, AI-assisted documentation, and integrated gallery-management workflows to support creation, reuse, and maintenance.

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).

Considering Visualization Example Galleries

TL;DR

The paper investigates the role and best practices of visualization example galleries, noting their varied purposes across marketing, reuse, and testing. It combines a gallery survey of 14 visualization-adjacent galleries with semi-structured interviews of 11 creators and 9 users to identify gallery forms, motivations, and cross-cutting design challenges. The findings reveal that gallery design involves trade-offs in contents, organization, and maintenance, shaped by creator and user goals, with implications for tooling and documentation. The work points to future directions including improved evaluation metrics, AI-assisted documentation, and integrated gallery-management workflows to support creation, reuse, and maintenance.

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).
Paper Structure (15 sections, 5 equations, 4 figures)

This paper contains 15 sections, 5 equations, 4 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and Related Work
  3. Methodology
  4. What are galleries?
  5. Gallery Motivations
  6. Cross-cutting Themes
  7. Education and Communication
  8. Maintenance
  9. Gallery Contents
  10. Discussion
  11. Interview Guides
  12. Creator Backgrounds
  13. Gallery Creator Interview Guide
  14. Gallery User Interview Guide
  15. Post Interview Survey for the Creators

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: We interviewed 11 gallery creators or maintainers. We include their de-anonymized names (with consent) to credit them for their work and insights.
  • Figure 2: Vega, Plot.ly and Idyll Galleries. Gallery organization and content depend on the goals and scope of the project they describe. Larger galleries are often categorized by features or task. To wit, Vega groups the examples as bar chart, line charts and so on, whereas Plot.ly groups by data domain like finance or statistics. In contrast Idyll's gallery is bifurcated into large high-level article examples and small low-level component examples.
  • Figure 3: Example counts in galleries we explored to situate our analysis.
  • Figure 4: Takeaways by theme: fooyellow!10 communication, fooOrangeRed!10 maintenance, and fooRoyalPurple!10 content.