Lyra: An Interactive Visualization Design Environment

Figure 1: The Lyra visualization design environment, here used to recreate William Playfair’s classic chart comparing the price of wheat and wages in England. Lyra enables the design of custom visualizations without writing code. We present Lyra, an interactive environment for designing customized visualizations without writing code. Using drag-and-drop interactions, designers can bind data to the properties of graphical marks to author expressive visualization designs. Marks can be moved, rotated and resized using handles; relatively positioned using con-nectors; and parameterized by data fields using property drop zones. Lyra also provides a data pipeline interface for iterative, visual specification of data transformations and layout algorithms. Visualizations created with Lyra are represented as specifications in Vega, a declarative visualization grammar that enables sharing and reuse. We evaluate Lyra’s expressivity and accessibility through diverse examples and studies with journalists and visual-ization designers. We find that Lyra enables users to rapidly develop customized visualizations, covering a design space comparable to existing programming-based tools