End-User Programming of Visualisations

Abstract

The societal project of enabling broad access to data visualisation is well underway. However, the learning curve for existing tools that support expressive visualisation is still too steep, leaving users to struggle either to work around the limited chart templating system available in tools like spreadsheets, or to spend time and resources learning new tools such as programming languages and complex dashboarding tools. This research seeks to empower more people to explore their data visually by taking an end-user programming perspective to the authoring of visualisations. Firstly, I investigate through two fieldwork studies how different groups of people work with data visualisations, paying particular attention to the tools they use and the activities they engage in. Informed by the real world experience of users and their existing challenges, I propose a new end-user programming approach of integrating different interaction paradigms and design a system called Cuscus for enabling the experience of creating novel visualisations. This system integrates a spreadsheet and graphical editor so that they share the same data and computational representation, and thus supporting data-centric visualisation construction and providing interactions that better match the tasks of exploring, analysing and visualising data. Two usability studies provide results which confirm that the proposed approach is easy to understand for end-user programmers who otherwise might have difficulties with expert data analysis tools, and that users comfortable with using spreadsheets can use Cuscus effectively. The investigations presented in this thesis have implications for the design of visualisation tools that better suit the needs of end-user programmers and provide them with approachable systems that make use of their existing skills and knowledge, and show the potential for the model of integrating interaction modalities to be applied to other domains where end-user programming is happening.