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First of all, it's gorgeous, far more visually pleasing than Matlab's plotting tools, which still seem to lack a decent compositing engine. As far as UX, I wou

First of all, it's gorgeous, far more visually pleasing than Matlab's plotting tools, which still seem to lack a decent compositing engine. As far as UX, I would expect click+drag to move the graph, but instead it gives me a context menu to zoom. (And why is "zoom out" in that context menu? Why do I need to select anything for that?) It would also be nice to be able to zoom into a point with the scroll wheel. Also, the command line doesn't seem to work at all in Firefox Nightly, and is quite slow to respond in Safari. I'm also a little curious how the concept will work out. There aren't many situations where I've wanted to put an interactive plot up online, and I suspect that the online Python environment is too limited for me to do my data analysis online (although perhaps this is your eventual plan?). If I could put my locally generated plots on plot.ly directly from Matlab/Python/Julia, I could see myself sending (private) links to online plots to my collaborators, but I'm not sure I'd pay for the privilege.

davorak 13y ago
> As far as UX, I would expect click+drag to move the graph, but instead it gives me a context menu to zoom. My impression was after reading this is that I expected to be able to drag the graph by holding cmd, option, ctr, or shift with click and drag. It turned out to be shift. I think I get this expectation from autocad, labview, mathematica and potentially other products as well.
- jparmer 13y ago
  Cool. Really helpful stuff.
jparmer 13y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We're most excited about collaborative data analysis. Imagine being able to simultaneously view/edit a graph and script for a computational problem being solved in a team... Programmers can do this in git, but a data scientist might want a tool that is more visual and focused around graphs. I worked at a semiconductor R&D company for a while and we often shared scripts and graphs by email... it felt like the 90s (:
Osmium 13y ago
Agreed with the UX criticisms -- scroll wheel is essential. And dragging isn't discoverable enough. Interface generally is still a little rough: it wasn't clear to me how to enable scatter points (as well as lines) because it looked liked I'd chosen the scatter type/size/colour etc, but it turns out I hadn't enabled the "line+point" mode. As far as I'm concerned, any graph element should be clickable and should bring up options to change it, e.g. the axes format. Lack of font options (webfonts maybe?) also a problem. I clicked one of the examples, clicked "show data" and then clicked "plot data" expecting it to go back to the graph, but instead it wasn't really clear how to do that -- and then I saw the original graph was still there as a tab. I don't know if it was still linked to the data or if the data tab was just a copy -- I tried changing a random data point to test, when back to the graph, and it was stuck updating. I only took the time to type up these criticisms/UX issues because I really, really like this product. The web is sorely in need of a great plotting solution and this looks really cool. Just a little rough around the edges, that's all!
- jparmer 13y ago
  Awesome. All super helpful stuff. Thanks so much for taking the time!

davorak 13y ago

> As far as UX, I would expect click+drag to move the graph, but instead it gives me a context menu to zoom. My impression was after reading this is that I expected to be able to drag the graph by holding cmd, option, ctr, or shift with click and drag. It turned out to be shift. I think I get this expectation from autocad, labview, mathematica and potentially other products as well.

jparmer 13y ago
Cool. Really helpful stuff.

jparmer 13y ago

Thanks for the feedback! We're most excited about collaborative data analysis. Imagine being able to simultaneously view/edit a graph and script for a computational problem being solved in a team... Programmers can do this in git, but a data scientist might want a tool that is more visual and focused around graphs. I worked at a semiconductor R&D company for a while and we often shared scripts and graphs by email... it felt like the 90s (:

Osmium 13y ago

Agreed with the UX criticisms -- scroll wheel is essential. And dragging isn't discoverable enough. Interface generally is still a little rough: it wasn't clear to me how to enable scatter points (as well as lines) because it looked liked I'd chosen the scatter type/size/colour etc, but it turns out I hadn't enabled the "line+point" mode. As far as I'm concerned, any graph element should be clickable and should bring up options to change it, e.g. the axes format. Lack of font options (webfonts maybe?) also a problem. I clicked one of the examples, clicked "show data" and then clicked "plot data" expecting it to go back to the graph, but instead it wasn't really clear how to do that -- and then I saw the original graph was still there as a tab. I don't know if it was still linked to the data or if the data tab was just a copy -- I tried changing a random data point to test, when back to the graph, and it was stuck updating. I only took the time to type up these criticisms/UX issues because I really, really like this product. The web is sorely in need of a great plotting solution and this looks really cool. Just a little rough around the edges, that's all!

jparmer 13y ago
Awesome. All super helpful stuff. Thanks so much for taking the time!