uVis Studio: An Integrated Development Environment for Visualization

摘要

A toolkit facilitates the visualization development process. The process can be further enhanced by integrating the toolkits in development environments. This paper describes how the uVis toolkit, a formula-based visualization toolkit, has been extended with a development environment, called uVis Studio. Instead of programming, developers apply a Drag-Drop-Set-View-Interact approach. Developers bind controls to data, and the Studio gives immediate visual feedback in the Design Panel. This is a novel feature, called What-You-Bind-Is-What-You-Get. The Studio also provides Modes that allow developers to interact and view the visualization from the end-user's perspective without switching workspace, and Auto-Completion; a feature of the Property Grid that provides suggestions not only for the formula language syntax but also for the tables, the table fields and the relationships in the database. We conducted a usability study with six developers to evaluate if the Studio and its features enhance cognition and facilitate the visualization development. The results show that developers appreciated the Drag-Drop-Set-View-Interact approach, the What-You-Bind-Is-What-You-Get, the Auto-Completion and the Modes. Several usability problems were identified, and some suggestions for improvement include: new panels, better presentation of the Modes, and better error messages.