Lowering the Barrier: Conversational Interfaces as a Novice-Friendly Path to Data Visualisation

Data visualisation software can often be unintuitive, which frequently leads to reduced efficiency and low user satisfaction. To address this, we have developed a conversational agent, VisuaLingua, which is able to generate bar, line and pie charts based on textual descriptions. To evaluate VisuaLingua, we carried out a user study comparing it to Google Sheets, using speed, number of mistakes, and user satisfaction as performance metrics. Results show that users of VisuaLingua generally had higher speed and fewer user errors than users of Google Sheets, with inconclusive results for user satisfaction. When we consider only beginner Google Sheets users, the difference when compared to the experimental group is even higher, suggesting that a conversational interface-based model would be a particularly suitable beginner-friendly alternative to spreadsheet-based solutions for generating data visualisations.