Reviewers want perfectly controlled experiments AND real-world ecological validity. But you can't have both, at least not in one study. New post on the validity tradeoff in HCI and what to do about it: niklaselmqvist.medium.com/you-cant-hav... (Spoiler: run two studies that complement each other.)

I'm excited to welcome the first member of the Visualization Design Lab @ TU Graz: Abhraneel Sarma. Abhraneel joins us as a PostDoc from Northwestern University in Chicago, where he just recently completed his PhD.

We’re excited to announce ReVISit v2.3, along with updates from versions 2.1 and 2.2. These releases introduce major new capabilities that make it easier to design, run, and analyze visualization studies. Check out what's new: revisit.dev/blog/2025/10...

Revisit by @laneh.bsky.social and team is an excellent option. It requires some configuration and setup, but it works beautifully and all your data stays on your server. (revisit.dev)

The reVISit team will be hosting an open hackathon at TU Graz in Austria, immediately after IEEE VIS from Monday November 10 to Wednesday November 13. Anyone interested in contributing to reVISit is invited to participate!

Can 3D-printed tactile charts help blind and low-vision users understand complex visualizations? Yes, and they are a preferred learning method. Read Tingying's blog post to see how it works and what we learned: www.visdesignlab.net/blog/2025/08...

"if we had a million pounds we could get a working robot in ten years" 1966 youtu.be/T282C7cjWwg?...

My new (and old) university TU Graz interviewed me about my return to Austria. Check it out; available in English and German. www.tugraz.at/news/artikel...

When I started @neuromadlab.bsky.social in 2017, we decided to publish all empirical papers as preprints. It helped us gain traction in the early days and avoid the kind of gate keeping of less convenient results. The benefits far outweighted any potential risk. I never regretted preprinting.

It's on! In its 8th year, the original VISxAI workshop wants your contributions for explaining ML/AI/GenAI principles. Please consider to submit. Deadline: July 30 webpage: visxai.io #ML #AI #GenAI #Visualization

We all love upset plots (the best way to represent set data), but how do we make them accessible to everyone? To answer this we { @maggiemccracken.bsky.social, @alex-lex.bsky.social, and others } developed a system (and ran a bunch of studies) to figure it out! vdl.sci.utah.edu/blog/2025/06...

If you're at EuroVis, join us for our reVISit tutorial tomorrow at 9 to learn about how to make powerful online user studies! diglib.eg.org/items/765579...

~45% of US corn production is now used to make ethanol, mostly for mixing into gasoline. That's ~13% of all US crop land already used for energy production. Using some of the same land for solar panels would capture 50-100 times more energy per acre.

If you're curios about how reVISit can help you run your user studies, join us for a meetup at #CHI2025 tomorrow from 9:00-10:30 in Room G218! revisit.dev

Maxim Lisnic is having a busy day presenting two #chi2025 papers on "guardrails against cherrypicking" and on "composing text in dashboard tools". Max is on the job market for PostDocs and academic positions. Talk to him if you're hiring! vdl.sci.utah.edu/publications... dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

good vis design is a lot harder an optimization problem than the data-ink ratio makes it seem, and talking about it as if it were that simple has misled many people into confidently creating bad charts, including Tufte

After an incredible decade at the University of Utah, I’m happy to share that I’ll be returning to my alma mater, TU Graz, this fall as a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction. I’ll be hiring a PhD student and a PostDoc in Graz—if you're interested in HCI and visualization get in touch!

Check out SCI's contributions to #CHI2025 this year, including two papers and a course from our lab. Can guardrails mitigate cherry picking in data explorers? vdl.sci.utah.edu/publications... Can you do Think Aloud studies on crowdsourced platforms? vdl.sci.utah.edu/publications...

Going to #CHI2025 in Japan? Interested in running user studies? Sign up for our virtual CHI 2025 course that teaches you how to use reVISit, a new, open-source user study tool reducing the tedium of study design. Come learn through some practical examples. cvent.me/g5mx2w revisit.dev

It’s the time of the year when students accepted to graduate programs make decisions on where to go, while others might still be anxiously waiting to hear back. Unfortunately, the grad admissions process is opaque, so I’ve written a post that gives background: vdl.sci.utah.edu/blog/2025/04...

Most of the world’s foreign aid comes from governments, not philanthropic foundations

Tactile charts are an important tool for conveying data to blind and low vision people via embossed paper. However, tactile charts require high levels of time and expertise to design. Introducing Tactile Vega-Lite, new work at #CHI2025 led by MIT SM student Katie Chen news.mit.edu/2025/making-...

Can you run a think-aloud study via crowdsourcing? Yes you can! We used reVISit for running and analyzing online TA studies. And yes, online participants do actually speak, though they’re more critical than lab participants. Check out the CHI paper: vdl.sci.utah.edu/publications... #datavis #chi2025

We're still looking for a few more participants!

1) Cool VIS study, 2) Help our replication effort! ->

How can we use black-and-white patterns in visualization? If you have visualization design experience, we’d love your input! We’re running a short study (less than 20 minutes) where you’ll experiment with designing patterns for a chart. Please participate here revisit.dev/replication-... Thank you!

Your dignity honors the bravery of the Ukrainian people. Be strong, be brave, be fearless. You are never alone, dear President Zelenskyy. We will continue working with you for a just and lasting peace.

Yeah, there is just a huge mismatch in type it seems. I also think a chat interface as a means to create a graphical output is always going to be a terrible fit. It's like driving a car with voice commands - beyond awkward. I don't think in sentences when I am designing a map... maybe others do?

Mark your calendars for this Feb. 27 discussion with Don Norman, a renowned expert in user-centered design and beyond. He's among the most cited researchers in the world. 🔥 Norman will be hosted by Vineet Pandey, one of the inaugural faculty fellows in SCI's One-U Responsible AI Initiative.

Do you work with text data for your job or research? We’d love to talk to you! We're running a paid user study to understand how people explore and visualize text data while programming—and to gather feedback on our new open-source visualization tool. Details below 👇

reVISit 2.0 Highlight: reVISit now supports Vega and Vega-Lite stimuli. You have the freedom to plug in Vega JSON configurations inline, or as a file. You can leverage interaction and reVISit's provenance tracking and interaction replay feature as well, with no extra effort. revisit.dev #datavis

ReVISit 2.0 (revisit.dev) reached several exciting milestones recently: 📁 You can now define an entire experiment in a single file— from trial data, stimuli (visualizations and interactions, thanks to Vega-Altair), study blocks/sequences and randomization, questionnaires, etc.

We systematically analyzed the visualizations used in 1,846 subfigures from 45 human single-cell atlas publications in a survey on The State of Single-Cell Atlas Data Visualization in the Biological Literature. 📝: osf.io/preprints/os... 🔍: keller-mark.github.io/sc-star-site/

I, for one, would like to see the legal analysis that explains what authority, if any, OMB has to restrict by memorandium the activities carried out under grants awarded under the NSF's established procedures.

"All NSF grantees must [cease] all non-compliant activities... that [use] DEIA principles and frameworks" The EO asks that DEIA "discrimination programs" be terminated "to the maximum extent allowed by law." But it is illegal to fail at accessibility and to discriminate. I'll be obeying the law.

reVISit 2.0 Highlight: Simplify your study setup with reVISit libraries! Effortlessly integrate common tasks such as color-blindness tests, visual literacy tests, and a variety of Vis and HCI questionnaires into your study with just two lines in your study setup. revisit.dev #datavis

reVISit 2.0 Highlight: Introducing reVISitPy: reVISit Python Bindings. Generate complex reVISit studies, preview running studies, and analyze study data, **all** from within Python! revisit.dev #datavis

One of my students is currently using this to build an online study (with some custom interactive components) and it's great!

We’re released reVISit 2.0, the latest version of our open user study platform! There are a LOT of awesome new things in this release that will not only make it easier to run your user study for #ieeevis, but give you new analysis capabilities. #datavis www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjP3...

My new lab is running its first study! Its a little (paid) interview study about data serialization formats (like yaml, json, and friends). Do you have opinions? We'd love to hear them

Still buzzing about the progress the team has made on reVISit over this workshop. Looking forward to sharing new features for creating & instrumenting vis experiments in our upcoming 2.0 release 👀

We introduced folks a Georgia Tech to revisit.dev yesterday in a workshop. Check out our slides to learn more about how to run a user study with revisit! #datavis sci.utah.edu/~vdl/talks/2... sci.utah.edu/~vdl/talks/2...

At the reVISit.dev retreat in Atlanta. And we're snowed in! Let us know if there are any features you're missing in reVISit. #userstudies #nsf w. @laneh.bsky.social & team.

Saw a porcupine climbing trees in the Brighton ski resort 🤩

We have some exciting #datavis developments at City St George's University of London including the UK's first Doctoral Training Centre in Data Visualization. But first... 🚨3 permanent lectureships available 🚨 www.city.ac.uk/about/jobs/a... Applications by 12th Jan. Message me if you want a chat

Interesting 📊 design choice by @nytimes.com: Vis designers often use a color like gray for regions with little-to-no data. But "in counties with few policies reported", @nytimes.com used the state avg + a dotted texture Imagine how different this would look + feel if those sections were gray! 🤔

I seriously do not know what I would do if Zotero ceased to exist -- I think my entire research world would completely crumble

I was just pleasantly surprised by this delightful feature of the #zotero PDF reader: When you hover over the citations, it shows you the relevant bits of the bibliography in a pop-up window.

Us #ieeevis 2025 OPCs worked hard on this: the new call for papers is now live! ieeevis.org/year/2025/ye... Submit your best work! Brief account of changes for 2025: * Extra week for supplemental material * Student reviewer program * Opt-in publication of reviews for accepted papers

How's saying LLMs don't always get it right. This is undoubtedly true!