Chalhoub, G;
Sarkar, A;
(2022)
"It's Freedom to Put Things Where My Mind Wants": Understanding and Improving the User Experience of Structuring Data in Spreadsheets.
In: Barbosa, S and Lampe, C and Appert, C and Shamma, DA and Drucker, S and Williamson, J and Yatani, K, (eds.)
CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): New York, NY, USA.
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Abstract
Despite efforts to augment or replace the 2-dimensional spreadsheet grid with formal data structures such as arrays and tables to ease formula authoring and reduce errors, the flexible grid remains overwhelmingly successful. Why? We interviewed a diverse sample of 21 spreadsheet users about their use of structure in spreadsheets. It emerges that data structuring is subject to a complex network of incentives and constraints, including factors extrinsic to spreadsheets such as the user's expertise, auxiliary tools, and collaborator needs. Moreover, we find that table columns are an important abstraction, and that operations such as conditional formatting, data validation, and formula authoring can be implemented on table columns, rather than cell ranges. To probe this, we designed 4 click-through prototypes for a follow-up study with 20 participants. We found that although column operations improved the value proposition of structured tables, they are unlikely to supplant the advantages of the flexible grid.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | "It's Freedom to Put Things Where My Mind Wants": Understanding and Improving the User Experience of Structuring Data in Spreadsheets |
| Event: | 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22) |
| Location: | New Orleans, LA |
| ISBN-13: | 9781450391573 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1145/3491102.3501833 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501833 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | spreadsheets, user experience, structure, data |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10180667 |
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