VisDock: A Toolkit for Cross-Cutting Interactions in Visualization

Standard user applications provide a range of cross-cutting interaction techniques that are common to virtually all such tools: selection, filtering, navigation, layer management, and cut-and-paste. We present VisDock, a JavaScript mixin library that provides a core set of these cross-cutting interaction techniques for visualization, including selection (lasso, paths, shape selection, etc), layer management (visibility, transparency, set operations, etc), navigation (pan, zoom, overview, magnifying lenses, etc), and annotation (point-based, region-based, data-space based, etc). To showcase the utility of the library, we have released it as Open Source and integrated it with a large number of existing web-based visualizations. Furthermore, we have evaluated VisDock using qualitative studies with both developers utilizing the toolkit to build new web-based visualizations, as well as with end-users utilizing it to explore movie ratings data. Results from these studies highlight the usability and effectiveness of the toolkit from both developer and end-user perspectives.