# **Understanding how Designers Find and Use Data Visualization Examples** **Abstract** Examples are useful for inspiring ideas and facilitating implementation in visualization design. However, there is little understanding of how visualization designers use examples, and how computational tools may support such activities. In this paper, we contribute an exploratory study of current practices in incorporating visualization examples. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 university students and 15 professional designers. Our analysis focus on two core design activities: searching for examples and utilizing examples. We characterize observed strategies and tools for performing these activities, as well as major challenges that hinder designers’ current workflows. In addition, we identify themes that cut across these two activities: criteria for determining example usefulness, curation practices, and design fixation. Given our findings, we discuss the implications for visualization design and authoring tools and highlight critical areas for future research. # **Content** This OSF repository contains all the supplementary materials for our submission. The figure below shows an outline of the analysis by authors. For a full description of the analysis process please refer to the full paper.  The following files hold all important data collected during our analysis of the interview records. - **[Interview Questions.docx:][1]** This pdf contains all the script of questions we asked during our interviews. - [**Demographics Survey-Cleaned.xlsx:**][2] Participants filled out the demographics survey before the interviews. This sheet presents all the important information from collected from participants. Each row contains baisc information like "ID" "Age" "Gender" "Occupation" "Visualization Projects" "Frequency of Designing Visualizations" "Experience". - **[Thematic Analysis - Clusters.xlsx:][3]** In our analysis each response to a question was coded. In this document we present the extracted codes organized in by their corresponding clusters, categories and high-level theme. - **[Visualization Tools Participants Mentioned.xlsx:][4]** This document classifies and counts all the visualization tools (including tools appeared once) the participants mentioned during the interviews. [1]: http://osf.io/cbzjs/ [2]: https://osf.io/jvmq2/ [3]: https://osf.io/6cx5u/ [4]: http://osf.io/7mbe5/