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Interactive data interfaces are critical in nearly every stage of data management—including data cleaning, wrangling, modeling, exploration, and communication. Yet creating new interfaces remains challenging—it requires careful specification of the analysis task, thoughtful interface design, and backend optimization to ensure responsiveness at scale. As data grows and shifts to cloud DBMSes, these challenges only intensify.
This dissertation envisions a more accessible and automated approach to building interactive data interfaces. It introduces DATA INTERFACE GRAMMAR, a compact and analyzable representation of interface analysis tasks. At the heart of DATA INTERFACE GRAMMAR is the idea of choice, which captures structural variations across queries while preserving their correspondence to interface design, thereby enabling new applications in automating both interface design and backend optimization. To automate interface design, we develop PRECISION INTERFACES 2, the first system that automatically generates fully interactive data interfaces from query sequences, and NL2INTERFACE, a prototype that extends this capability to natural language queries. To automate backend optimization, we formulate the PHYSICAL VISUALIZATION DESIGN problem and develop JADE, a prototype system that automatically generates backend architectures satisfying both per-interaction latency requirements and resource constraints.