Double Tap for This Post: Understanding the Communication of Data Visualization on Social MediaData visualizations are increasingly used by news outlets on social media to communicate insights to a broad audience. However, little is known about how readers interact with and respond to data visualizations in these quick-consumption environments. In this work, we introduce a conceptual model that categorizes visualization reading that leads to the communication effect of likes on Instagram. The model was developed through a grounded theory analysis of the statements explaining the reasoning behind the likes of visualization, which were recorded from a preliminary study. Informed by coding the statements from two dimensions including scopes and design patterns concerning visualization, our model consists of three levels: depicting the "look'' of a visualization (e.g., artistic style and color scheme); interpreting the "flesh and bones'' of a visualization (e.g., visualization and narrative); and elucidating the "heart and soul'' of a visualization (e.g., insights and conclusion). We also conducted an online crowdsourcing user study with 200 participants to demonstrate how our model can be applied to improve the communication of visualization by comparing the three levels.2025YSYang Shi et al.Data VisualizationCSCW
ViviClay: Designing and Fabricating Ceramics with Animation Effects on Physical SurfacesWe present ViviClay, a design and fabrication method that integrates thermochromic coatings with internal pipe structures to produce dynamic surface effects on ceramics. By channeling thermal fluid through embedded pathways, the surface exhibits reversible color changes, enabling animated patterns that are more programmable and varied than those of conventional thermochromic mugs. To address challenges in 3D printing clay—such as deformation and pipe clogging—we propose key design strategies, optimize fabrication parameters, and introduce a relief-style technique for curved surfaces. Building on this method, we develop a software tool and a set of structured design exemplars to support diverse form exploration while lowering design barriers. We demonstrate its potential through conceptual prototypes inspired by everyday everyday fluid interaction. This work represents the first exploration of 3D-printed ceramics that enable animated surface behavior in HCI, opening new directions for interactive and expressive ceramic practices.2025GLGuanhong Liu et al.Shape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsTextile Art & Craft DigitizationUIST
Personalizing Products with Stylized Head Portraits for Self-ExpressionPersonalizing products aesthetically or functionally can help users increase personal relevance and support self-expression. However, using non-abstract personal data such as head portraits for product personalization has been understudied. While recent advances in Artificial Intelligence have enabled generating stylized head portraits, these images also raise concerns about lack of control, artificiality, and ethics, which potentially limit their broader use. In this work, we present PicMe, a design support tool that converts user face photos into stylized head portraits as vector graphics that can be used to personalize products. To enable style transfer, PicMe leverages a deep-learning-based algorithm trained on an extended open-source illustration dataset of characters in a cartoonish and minimalistic style. We evaluated PicMe through two experiments and a user study. The results of our evaluation showed that PicMe can help create personalized head portraits that support self-expression.2024YSYang Shi et al.College of Design and Innovation, Tongji UniversityGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Customizable & Personalized ObjectsCHI
Beyond Numbers: Creating Analogies to Enhance Data Comprehension and Communication with Generative AIUnfamiliar measurements usually hinder readers from grasping the scale of the numerical data, understanding the content, and feeling engaged with the context. To enhance data comprehension and communication, we leverage analogies to bridge the gap between abstract data and familiar measurements. In this work, we first conduct semi-structured interviews with design experts to identify design problems and summarize design considerations. Then, we collect an analogy dataset of 138 cases from various online sources. Based on the collected dataset, we characterize a design space for creating data analogies. Next, we build a prototype system, AnalogyMate, that automatically suggests data analogies, their corresponding design solutions, and generated visual representations powered by generative AI. The study results show the usefulness of AnalogyMate in aiding the creation process of data analogies and the effectiveness of data analogy in enhancing data comprehension and communication.2024QCQing Chen et al.Tongji UniversityGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Data StorytellingCHI
Understanding Design Collaboration Between Designers and Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Literature ReviewRecent interest in design through the artificial intelligence (AI) lens is rapidly increasing. Designers, as a special user group interacting with AI, have received more attention in the Human-Computer Interaction community. Prior work has discussed emerging challenges that persist in designing for AI. However, few systematic reviews focus on \textit{AI for design} to understand how designers and AI can augment each other's complementary strengths in design collaboration. In this work, we conducted a landscape analysis of AI for design, via a systematic literature review of 93 papers. The analysis first provides a bird's eye view of overall patterns in this area. The analysis also reveals three themes interpreted from the paper corpus associated with AI for design, including AI assisting designers, designers assisting AI, and characterizing designer-AI collaboration. We discuss the implications of our findings and suggested methodological proposals to guide HCI toward research and practices that center on collaborative creativity.2023YSYang Shi et al.State of the FieldCSCW
ColorCook: Augmenting Color Design for Dashboarding with Domain-Associated PalettesVisualization dashboards serve as an information presentation that uses a tiled layout of key metrics visualized in charts for collaborative decision-making. Existing work has developed tools and techniques for computational color design. Much of these efforts have focused on selecting effective color palettes for independent charts while few attempts have been made to support the expressive color design of multiple coordinated charts in dashboards. In this work, we describe ColorCook, an interactive system that helps design expressive and effective dashboard colorings using domain-associated palettes. ColorCook employs an integrated color workflow for dashboarding, consisting of palette selection, color assignment, and color adjustment. We evaluated ColorCook through a crowdsourcing experiment and a user study. The results of our evaluation indicated that ColorCook is useful for effective and expressive color design.2022YSYang Shi et al.Feedback-giving & Decision-making; Feedback-giving & Decision-makingCSCW
Negative Emotions, Positive Outcomes? Exploring the Communication of Negativity in Serious Data StoriesRecent work has highlighted that emotion is key to the user experience with data stories. However, limited attention has been paid to negative emotions specifically. This work investigates the outcomes of negative emotions in the context of serious data stories and examines how they can be augmented by design methods from the perspectives of both storytellers and viewers. First, we conducted a workshop with 9 data story experts to understand the possible benefits of eliciting negative emotions in serious data stories and 19 potential design methods that contribute to negative emotions. Based on the findings from the workshop, we then conducted a lab study with 35 participants to explore the outcomes of eliciting negative emotions as well as the effectiveness of the design methods. The results indicated that negative emotions mainly facilitated contemplative experiences and long-term memory. Besides, the design methods showed varied effectiveness in augmenting negative emotions and being recalled.2022XLXingyu Lan et al.Tongji University, Tongji UniversityData StorytellingVisualization Perception & CognitionCHI
Vinci: An Intelligent Graphic Design System for Generating Advertising PostersAdvertising posters are a commonly used form of information presentation to promote a product. Producing advertising posters often takes much time and effort of designers when confronted with abundant choices of design elements and layouts. This paper presents Vinci, an intelligent system that supports the automatic generation of advertising posters. Given the user-specified product image and taglines, Vinci uses a deep generative model to match the product image with a set of design elements and layouts for generating an aesthetic poster. The system also integrates online editing-feedback that supports users in editing the posters and updating the generated results with their design preference. Through a series of user studies and a Turing test, we found that Vinci can generate posters as good as human designers and that the online editing-feedback improves the efficiency in poster modification.2021SGShunan Guo et al.Tongji UniversityGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Graphic Design & Typography ToolsCHI
Communicating with Motion: A Design Space for Animated Visual Narratives in Data VideosData videos are a genre of narrative visualization that communicates stories by combining data visualization and motion graphics. While data videos are increasingly gaining popularity, few systematic reviews or structured analyses exist for their design. In this work, we introduce a design space for animated visual narratives in data videos. The design space combines a dimension for animation techniques that are frequently used to facilitate data communication with one for visual narrative strategies served by such animation techniques to support story presentation. We derived our design space from the analysis of 82 high-quality data videos collected from online sources. We conducted a workshop with 20 participants to evaluate the effectiveness of our design space. Qualitative and quantitative feedback suggested that our design space is inspirational and useful for designing and creating data videos.2021YSYang Shi et al.Tongji UniversityInteractive Data VisualizationData StorytellingCHI
Understanding Narrative Linearity for Telling Expressive Time-Oriented StoriesCreating expressive narrative visualization often requires choosing a well-planned narrative order that invites the audience in. The narrative can either follow the linear order of story events (chronology), or deviate from linearity (anachronies). While evidence exists that anachronies in novels and films can enhance story expressiveness, little is known about how they can be incorporated into narrative visualization. To bridge this gap, this work introduces the idea of narrative linearity to visualization and investigates how different narrative orders affect the expressiveness of time-oriented stories. First, we conducted preliminary interviews with seven experts to clarify the motivations and challenges of manipulating narrative linearity in time-oriented stories. Then, we analyzed a corpus of 80 time-oriented stories and identified six most salient patterns of narrative orders. Next, we conducted a crowdsourcing study with 221 participants. Results indicated that anachronies have the potential to make time-oriented stories more expressive without hindering comprehensibility.2021XLXingyu Lan et al.Tongji University, Tongji UniversityData StorytellingVisualization Perception & CognitionCHI
EmoG: Supporting the Sketching of Emotional Expressions for StoryboardingStoryboarding is an important ideation technique that uses sequential art to depict important scenarios of user experience. Existing data-driven support for storyboarding focuses on constructing user stories, but fail to address its benefit as a graphic narrative device. Instead, we propose to develop a data-driven design support tool that increases the expressiveness of user stories by facilitating sketching storyboards. To explore this, we focus on supporting the sketching of emotional expressions of characters in storyboards. In this paper, we present EmoG, an interactive system that generates sketches of characters with emotional expressions based on input strokes from the user. We evaluated EmoG with 21 participants in a controlled user study. The results showed that our tool has significantly better performance in usefulness, ease of use, and quality of results than the baseline system.2020YSYang Shi et al.Tongji UniversityGraphic Design & Typography ToolsCustomizable & Personalized ObjectsCHI
Visualizing Uncertainty and Alternatives in Event Sequence PredictionsData analysts apply machine learning and statistical methods to timestamped event sequences to tackle various problems but face unique challenges when interpreting the results. Especially in event sequence prediction, it is difficult to convey uncertainty and possible alternative paths or outcomes. In this work, informed by interviews with five machine learning practitioners, we iteratively designed a novel visualization for exploring event sequence predictions of multiple records where users are able to review the most probable predictions and possible alternatives alongside uncertainty information. Through a controlled study with 18 participants, we found that users are more confident in making decisions when alternative predictions are displayed and they consider the alternatives more when deciding between two options with similar top predictions.2019SGShunan Guo et al.East China Normal UniversityTime-Series & Network Graph VisualizationUncertainty VisualizationCHI
ECGLens: Interactive Visual Exploration of Large Scale ECG Data for Arrhythmia DetectionThe Electrocardiogram (ECG) is commonly used to detect arrhythmias. Traditionally, a single ECG observation is used for diagnosis, making it difficult to detect irregular arrhythmias. Recent technology developments, however, have made it cost-effective to collect large amounts of raw ECG data over time. This promises to improve diagnosis accuracy, but the large data volume presents new challenges for cardiologists. This paper introduces ECGLens, an interactive system for arrhythmia detection and analysis using large-scale ECG data. Our system integrates an automatic heartbeat classification algorithm based on convolutional neural network, an outlier detection algorithm, and a set of rich interaction techniques. We also introduce A-glyph, a novel glyph designed to improve the readability and comparison of ECG signals. We report results from a comprehensive user study showing that A-glyph improves the efficiency in arrhythmia detection, and demonstrate the effectiveness of ECGLens in arrhythmia detection through two expert interviews.2018KXKe Xu et al.The Hong Kong University of Science and TechnologyInteractive Data VisualizationMedical & Scientific Data VisualizationCHI