Voyager 2: Augmenting Visual Analysis with Partial View Specifications
Zening Qu
Riley Chang
Felix Ouk
Published at
CHI
| Denver, CO, USA
2017
Voyager 2 blends manual and automated chart specification.
Abstract
Visual data analysis involves both open-ended and focused exploration. Manual
chart specification tools support question answering, but are often tedious for
early-stage exploration where systematic data coverage is needed. Visualization
recommenders can encourage broad coverage, but irrelevant suggestions may
distract users once they commit to specific questions. We present Voyager 2, a
mixed-initiative system that blends manual and automated chart specification to
help analysts engage in both open-ended exploration and targeted question
answering. We contribute two partial specification interfaces: wildcards let
users specify multiple charts in parallel, while related views suggest
visualizations relevant to the currently specified chart. We present our
interface design and applications of the CompassQL visualization query language
to enable these interfaces. In a controlled study we find that Voyager 2 leads
to increased data field coverage compared to a traditional specification tool,
while still allowing analysts to flexibly drill-down and answer specific
questions.