Blocks: Creating Rich Tables with Drag-and-Drop Interaction

Abstract

We present Blocks, a formalism that enables the building of visualizations by specifying layout, data relationships, and level of detail (LOD) for specific portions of the visualization. Users can create and manipulate Blocks on a canvas interface through drag-and-drop interaction, controlling the LOD of the data attributes for tabular style visualizations. We conducted a user study to compare how 24 participants employ Blocks and Tableau to complete a target visualization task. Findings from the study suggest that Blocks is a useful mechanism for creating visualizations with embedded microcharts, conditional formatting, and custom layouts. We describe future directions for extending Blocks in visual analysis interfaces.