Examples in Design
Collaborators: Xinyi Liu, Grace Ko, Leilani Battle and Zhicheng Liu
It is often said that no idea is original and this rings true for visualization design. Most designers never start creating visualizations from scratch,
most build on ideas sourced from examplar designs that they find online or have seen in the past. Consequently, examples are an important part of the creative
process, however, very little has been done to investigate the impact that examples have on the visualization design process and how we can support the example based
design of visualizations. I'm currently working on a research that explores how we can tackle this challenge of example aided design across 2 core axes:
- The search for inspiring designs
- Selecting and translating ideas from examples into design ideas
The first iteration of this project investigated how visualization designers incorporate examples into their current design practices. We find that examples are an integral part of visualization design as they are used to communicate, understand client
needs and evaluate appropriate design choices. However,the search for examples and integration of ideas gotten from examples is largely
under-served by current visualization tools. As a result, designers are unable to find
inspiring examples and properly translate derived ideas to their designs because visualization tools do not support the techniques they commonly use such as selecting and
transferring features between multiple designs or importing and modifying an example directly. Implementing design ideas from examples can also be tedious because
designers may not fully understand how to compartmentalize and integrate the individual code components that are needed to implement their design.
The current research for this project builds on these observations to explore quantitative and qualitative ways to measure the influence examples have on the visualization designs and how
we can use this information to improve the current design of visualization prototyping and implementation tools.
Publications
Understanding how Designers Find and Use Data Visualization Examples