Alexander Lex

The study browser and the study card interfaces in reVISit with new features showing how conditions chosen via URL parameters are shown.

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...

You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It Too The Validity Tradeoff in HCI Research

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.)

He's also here on bsky: @abhsarma.bsky.social

He timed his arrival in Austria well: his first work-day was spent at IEEE VIS in Vienna. Very glad to have you on board! 🎉

Check out his website to learn about his work: abhsarma.github.io

Portraet photo of Abhraneel Sarma

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.

A special thanks to @sheng-long.bsky.social for contributing the Virtual Chinrest Calibration library—our first community contribution!

ReVISit continues to evolve as a flexible, open-source platform for visualization and HCI research.

* Expanded styling options for customizing the look and accessibility of studies.
* A live monitor and study summary dashboard for real-time progress and insights.
* Dynamic study logic and new validated libraries for visualization literacy, usability, and workload assessment.

Key highlights include:

* Support for Supabase, a self-hosted and GDPR-friendly alternative to Firebase.
* Screen capture for recording participant interactions directly within studies.
* A new qualitative coding interface for analyzing transcripts and study replays.

A screenshot of the reVISit visit replay interface with the video of a visualization experiment on top, and a video-editor like menu at the bottom.

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...

Home | ReVISit reVISit: Reproducible and Powerful Visualization User Studies

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

We will be covering transportation and lodging (shared room with other participants) for up to 4 participants. Preference will be given to individuals who’ve run studies with reVISit before.

To express interest, e-mail alex@sci.utah.edu

To learn about reVISit, visit 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!

Home | ReVISit reVISit: Reproducible and Powerful Visualization User Studies

We will be covering transportation from Vienna and three nights in a hotel (shared room with other participants) for up to 4 participants. Preference will be given to who's run studies with reVISit before.

To express interest, e-mail alex@sci.utah.edu

To learn about reVISit, visit revisit.dev

Tingying He, Maggie McCracken, Daniel Hajas, Sarah Creem-Regehr.

We created educational tactile versions of UpSet plots, clustered heatmaps, violin plots, and faceted line charts. In interviews, BLV participants said these models helped them build stronger mental models than textual explanations alone.

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...

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

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

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.

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

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 ...

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.

Home | ReVISit reVISit: Reproducible and Powerful Visualization User Studies

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

Max presenting at CHI

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

I’ll be joining the Institute of Human-Centred Computing – hcc.tugraz.at – and look forward to new collaborations with the fantastic team there.
I’ll stay closely connected to Utah, continuing my work with the amazing team at the SCI Institute and the Kahlert School of Computing.

The clock tower of Graz and the city in the background.

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...

We’ll also hold an in-person get-together for course participants and anyone interested in reVISit in Room G218, 9:00–10:30am on Thursday, May 1.