Intents, Techniques, and Components: a Unified Analysis of Interaction Authoring Tasks in Data Visualization
Hyemi Song, Sai Gopinath, Zhicheng Liu
TL;DR
The paper tackles the challenge of describing how to author interactivity in data visualizations by introducing a unified framework that operates across three abstraction levels: intents (authoring and user), techniques to realize those intents, and low-level components that implement them. It systematically analyzes 592 interaction units from 47 real-world visualizations to consolidate and extend existing taxonomies, defining four authoring intents and a three-tier component model. The work provides descriptive, evaluative, and generative capabilities, illustrating how the framework can critique current tools and inspire new design, including an interactive web platform to collect real-world examples. Together, these contributions advance a theory-driven approach to designing flexible, expressive interaction authoring tools for visual analytics and storytelling.
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.