A Spreadsheet-Based User Interface for Managing Plural Relationships in Structured Data
Name
Karger_A Spreadsheet-based.pdf
Size
1.34 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
61997285b8201c41eaba9fe2da98bab8
Author(s)
Bakke, Eirik
Karger, David R.
Miller, Robert C.
Date Issued
May 2011
Journal
Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11)
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Eirik Bakke, David Karger, and Rob Miller. 2011. A spreadsheet-based user interface for managing plural relationships in structured data. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '11).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
A key feature of relational database applications is managing \emph{plural} relationships---one-to-many and many-to-many---between entities. However, since it is often infeasible to adopt or develop a new database application for any given schema at hand, information workers instead turn to spreadsheets, which lend themselves poorly to schemas requiring multiple related entity sets. In this paper, we propose to reduce the cost-usability gap between spreadsheets and tailor-made relational database applications by extending the spreadsheet paradigm to let the user establish relationships between rows in related worksheets as well as view and navigate the hierarchical cell structure that arises as a result. We present Related Worksheets, a spreadsheet-like prototype application, and evaluate it with a screencast-based user study on 36 Mechanical Turk workers. First-time users of our software were able to solve lookup-type query tasks with the same or higher accuracy as subjects using Microsoft Excel, in one case 40% faster on average.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979313
