Toward a Scalable Census of Dashboard Designs in the Wild: A Case Study with Tableau Public

Dashboards remain ubiquitous artifacts for presenting or reasoning with data across different domains. Yet, there has been little work that provides a quantifiable, systematic, and descriptive overview of dashboard designs at scale. We propose a schematic representation of dashboard designs as node-link graphs to better understand their spatial and interactive structures. We apply our approach to a dataset of 25,620 dashboards curated from Tableau Public to provide a descriptive overview of the core building blocks of dashboards in the wild and derive common dashboard design patterns. To guide future research, we make our dashboard corpus publicly available and discuss its application toward the development of dashboard design tools.Comment: *J. Purich and A. Srinivasan contributed equally to the wor

An Adaptive Benchmark for Modeling User Exploration of Large Datasets

Interactive analysis systems provide efficient and accessible means by which users of varying technical experience can comfortably manipulate and analyze data using interactive widgets. Widgets are elements of interaction within a user interface (e.g. scrollbar, button, etc). Interactions with these widgets produce database queries whose results determine the subsequent changes made to the current visualization made by the user. In this paper, we present a tool that extends IDEBench to ingest visualization interfaces and a dataset, and estimate the expected database load that would be generated by real users. Our tool analyzes the interactive capabilities of the visualization and creates the queries that support the various interactions. We began with a proof of concept implementation of every interaction widget, which led us to define three distinct sets of query templates that can support all interactions. We then show that these templates can be layered to imitate various interfaces and tailored to any dataset. Secondly, we simulate how users would interact with the proposed interface and report on the strain that such use would place on the database management system