Exploring Visualization Implementation Challenges Faced by D3 Users Online

Visualization languages help to standardize the process of designing effective visualizations, one of the most prominent being D3. However, few researchers have analyzed at scale how users incorporate these languages into existing visualization programming processes, i.e., implementation workflows. In this paper, we present a new method for evaluating visualization languages. Our method emphasizes the experiences of users as observed through the online communities that have sprouted to facilitate public discussion and support around visualization languages. We demonstrate our method by analyzing D3 implementation workflows and challenges discussed on Stack Overflow. Our results show how the visualization community may be limiting its understanding of users' visualization implementation challenges by ignoring the larger context in which languages such as D3 are used. Based on our findings, we suggest new research directions to enhance the user experience with visualization languages. All our data and code are available at: https://osf.io/fup48/?view_only=2cdecfd00f1048a98064b381bde27c18.