I wrote a blog post, “Beyond the Demo: Building Visualization Research Software That Lasts”, based on a keynote I gave at VisGap at EuroVis in Nottingham last month. It reflects on what it takes to build visualization software that survives beyond the paper. www.visdesignlab.net/blog/2026/07...

In our latest Points of View column, @helenajambor.bsky.social and Alexander Lex cover scientific web applications for creating biological data figures. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How scientists simplify their datavis with a few clicks - read more in **Click to plot** article, out in @natureportfolio.nature.com I love these resources, because I know they bridge the experimentalists journeying into advanced plots and coding eventually. Great collab @alex-lex.bsky.social

Want to study how people interact with an AI? reVISit now supports LLM-based chatbots as first-class study components, with provenance tracking built in. We put together a demo and a step-by-step guide for adapting it to your own research. Check out the blog post at revisit.dev/blog/2026/04...

V 2.4 of reVISit – our online user study platform – is out, and it’s all about speed and stability. There are new features, including the ability to specify a condition via the URL, but the focus was fixing bugs! You can read about the release on the blog: revisit.dev/blog/2026/02...

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.)

You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

The Validity Tradeoff in HCI Research

niklaselmqvist.medium.com

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)

Home | ReVISit

reVISit: Reproducible and Powerful Visualization User Studies

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?...

1966: ROBOT HOUSEKEEPERS Coming Soon | Tomorrow's World | Past Predictions | BBC Archive

YouTube video by BBC Archive

youtu.be

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...

Alexander Lex: Wie können Daten besser kommuniziert werden?

Alexander Lex beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie sich die Interaktion zwischen Mensch und Computer verbessern lässt – insbesondere in der Visualisierung und Accessibility.

tugraz.at

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.

Katherine Brown@katherine-brown.bsky.social · last yr.

Hard to remember that just 12 years ago there was no @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social and almost no one in the biology community preprinted their work. What a long way we’ve come. @reinierprosee.bsky.social and I wrote a thing about how @biologists.bsky.social embraced the preprint world

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...

Making Data Visualizations Talk: Accessible Text Descriptions for UpSet Plots

Data visualizations in scientific journals are essential for understanding the content of an article. However, visualizations typically are inaccessible for blind or low-vision users. A common remedy ...

vdl.sci.utah.edu

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

Home | ReVISit

reVISit: Reproducible and Powerful Visualization User Studies

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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...

Scientific Computing & Imaging Institute@sci.utah.edu · last yr.

SCI has a growing presence at @chi.acm.org, the top conference on human-computer interaction. Our #CHI2025 contributions: 4 papers, 1 of which won hon. mention (kudos to @mcnuttandrew.bsky.social), along with a course & a paper in the boundary-pushing alt.chi forum. www.sci.utah.edu/the-institut...

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...

Reading Between the Lines: The US Computer Science Graduate Admission Process

It’s the time of the year that prospective graduate students have to commit to a particular computer science graduate program. Those that got multiple offers are in the envious position to be able to ...

vdl.sci.utah.edu

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-...

A new way to make graphs more accessible to blind and low-vision readers

Designed to help blind and low-vision readers understand graphics, the “Tactile Vega-Lite” system from MIT CSAIL converts data into a standard visual graph and a tactile chart. Accessibility standards...

news.mit.edu

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

Crowdsourced Think-Aloud Studies

The think-aloud (TA) protocol is a useful method for evaluating user interfaces, including data visualizations. However, TA studies are time-consuming to conduct and hence often have a small number of...

vdl.sci.utah.edu

We're still looking for a few more participants!

Alexander Lex@alex-lex.bsky.social · last yr.

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!

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

Alexander Lex@alex-lex.bsky.social · last yr.

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!