Idyll Studio: A Structured Editor for Authoring Interactive & Data-Driven Articles Matthew Conlen mconlen@uw.edu University of Washington Seattle, Washington, USA Megan Vo meganv@idyll-lang.org Idyll Collective Seattle, Washington, USA Alan Tan alan@idyll-lang.org Idyll Collective Seattle, Washington, USA Jefrey Heer jheer@uw.edu University of Washington Seattle, Washington, USA ABSTRACT Interactive articles are an efective medium of communication in education, journalism, and scientifc publishing, yet are created using complex general-purpose programming tools. We present Idyll Studio, a structured editor for authoring and publishing inter- active and data-driven articles. We extend the Idyll framework to support refective documents, which can inspect and modify their underlying program at runtime, and show how this functionality can be used to reify the constituent parts of a reactive document modelÐcomponents, text, state, and stylesÐin an expressive, inter- operable, and easy-to-learn graphical interface. In a study with 18 diverse participants, all could perform basic editing and composi- tion, use datasets and variables, and specify relationships between components. Most could choreograph interactive visualizations and dynamic text, although some struggled with advanced uses requir- ing unstructured code editing. Our fndings suggest Idyll Studio lowers the threshold for non-experts to create interactive articles and allows experts to rapidly specify a wide range of article designs. CCS CONCEPTS · Human-centered computing → Visualization systems and tools; User interface programming; · Applied computing → Hypertext / hypermedia creation. KEYWORDS interactive articles, computational media, explorable explanations ACM Reference Format: Matthew Conlen, Megan Vo, Alan Tan, and Jefrey Heer. 2021. Idyll Studio: A Structured Editor for Authoring Interactive & Data-Driven Articles. In The 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’21), October 10ś14, 2021, Virtual Event, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3472749.3474731 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. UIST ’21, October 10ś14, 2021, Virtual Event, USA © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8635-7/21/10. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3472749.3474731 1 INTRODUCTION Interactive articles [31] like Victor’s Explorable Explanations [73] utilize dynamic text, manipulable controls, and interactive graphics to present information to viewers in an engaging, reader-driven form. This format is a useful medium of communication across domains like journalism [28, 66], education [45], and scientifc pub- lishing [20] because interactive articles can promote active read- ing [73], foster engagement [17, 28], and lead to improved learning outcomes [36, 66]. While some tools exist to support the creation of these articles [14, 61], they typically require that authors are familiar with technical tools like the command-line and often mandate the use of general purpose programming languages like JavaScript or Python. These requirements make it difcult or impossible for those with limited programming knowledgeÐfor example some educators and journalistsÐto create interactive articles [14]. For those who do have the requisite programming knowledge, the article creation process is still time consuming and cognitively demanding [31]. We present Idyll Studio, a novel structured editing interface for authoring data-driven, interactive documents. With this tool, au- thors can use a graphical, WYSIWYG-style interface to create, edit, and publish interactive articles. We show through a frst-use study how, in many cases, the tool eliminates the need to use general purpose programming tools, and how it can streamline the article creation process for both novice users and technical experts. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: • Extensions to the Idyll framework to support refective documents which can inspect and modify their own pro- grams at runtime. We use these extensions to create a fexible structured editing API which powers Idyll Studio. • Idyll StudioÐa structured editor for authoring interactive & data-driven articlesÐreleased as open source software that can be downloaded and used today. 1 • A frst-use study in which 18 participants with a wide range of backgrounds used Idyll Studio to perform rapid prototyp- ing tasks. We found that Idyll Studio enabled non-technical users to complete tasks they otherwise could not, and al- lowed expert users to create articles more rapidly and with fewer cognitive demands compared to existing tools. 1 https://github.com/idyll-lang/idyll-studio/releases