Visualization of tabular data on mobile devices

Abstract: This thesis evaluates various ways of displaying tabular data on mobile devices using different responsive table solutions. It also presents a tool to help web developers and designers in the process of choosing and implementing a suitable table approach. The proposed solution for this thesis is a web system called The Visualizing Wizard that allows the user to answer some questions about the intended table and then get a recommended responsive table solution generated based on the answers. The system uses a rule-based approach via Prolog to match the answers to a set of rules and provide an appropriate result. In order to determine which table solutions are more appropriate to use for which type of data a statistical analysis and user tests were performed. The statistical analysis contains an investigation to identify the most common table approaches and data types used on various websites. The result indicates that solutions such as "squish", "collapse by rows", "click" and "scroll" are most common. The most common table categories are product comparison, product offerings, sports and stock market/statistics. This information was used to implement and establish user tests to collect feedback and opinions. The data and statistics gathered from the user tests were mapped into sets of rules to answer the question of which responsive table solution is more appropriate to use for which type of data. This serves as the foundation for The Visualizing Wizard.