SkyGlyphs: Reflections on the Design of a Delightful Visualization

In creating SkyGlyphs, our goal was to develop a data visualization that could possibly capture people's attention and spark their curiosity to explore a dataset. This work was inspired by a mingling of research including serendipitous interactions, visualizations for public displays, and personal visualizations. SkyGlyphs is a nonconventional whimsical visualization, depicting datapoints as animated balloons in space. We designed it to encourage non-experts to casually browse the contents of a repository through visual interactions like linking and grouping of datapoints. Our contributions include SkyGlyphs' representation and our design reflection that reveals a perspective on how to design delightful visualizations.