Techniques to facilitate visualization of an application associated with an industrial automation environment are disclosed herein. In at least one implementation, a plurality of data items associated with machine operations in the industrial automation environment is presented. A user selection of at least one data item of the plurality of data items is received. Additionally, display instructions comprising display properties of the at least one data item and position information that identifies where to display the at least one data item are also received. The display instructions are processed to render a graphical user interface to the application, wherein the at least one data item is displayed according to the display properties and positioned in the graphical user interface based on the position information.