Blogs in this series are based on the early access preview version of Plotly Studio. Plotly Studio is an AI-powered desktop application by Plotly designed to automate the creation of professional data apps and visualizations.
Experiment 4 with hashtag#plotlystudio, recreating charts again. From version 0.13 to 0.20, it is noticeably faster, more stable, and offers significant layout and functionality improvements.
A few weeks ago, I decided to recreate a chart of my own on MTA ridership (post-pandemic recovery trends by transportation category) and also tried to reproduce some work originally built by Michael Pason . There was a short gap between the idea and the execution, but here are the results.
As input, I used a grouped dataframe from the original dataset with weekly aggregated numbers. For context, I provided Plotly Studio only a short description of the data and the request to generate insights into recovery by transport mode.
Please note: sometimes effort went into color selection, sometimes it was only about testing the concept — no time spent on r
efining visuals. The screenshots are directly from Studio, in order to also show the prompts. This means fonts selected by the theme are not visible. The highlighted part of the outline prompt in the images is what I added, or how I built the chart.
Was it all done in 5 minutes? No, but I do remember how much work it was to create the original (and all context and details).
✔️ Area chart with recovery trends (images 1 and 2):
Recovery trends in absolute numbers or percentages: based on a chart proposed and generated by hashtag#plotlystudio, then adjusted by me. It took me about 25 minutes to match the original colors from my own design.
Missing in the absolute numbers view: the yellow dotted line, a trendline starting August 2021 based on linear regression. I tried very detailed descriptions and very shallow ones, but the best result was a line starting at zero passengers in August 2021, which would lead to overly optimistic recovery projections.
✔️ Heatmap (image 3):
A hashtag#plotlystudio original. I liked it and kept it.
✔️ Line chart with play option (image 4):
Created from scratch, no effort spent on colors.
This took about 10 minutes, and it surprisingly included a working play option, which I did not expect much from the “give the user a play…” prompt.
The red square is an example showing how easy it is to add context.
✔️ Horizontal bar with all transport modes as % of the whole (image 5):
The only explicit instruction required was “One stacked bar,” not a 100% stacked bar for each transport mode.
