Visualization of Entities Within Social Media: Toward Understanding Users' Needs

Social media platforms are taking a more central role in enterprises to enable employees to communicate, share knowledge and self-organize outside the traditional organizational chart. As a result, new tools are needed to help users process, understand and make decisions based on the complex relationships between the people, communities and content in these new online social structures. To understand user needs and preferences, we developed fourteen social media data visualization concepts and conducted a user evaluation of these concepts. Both the usefulness of the underlying data/relationships and the usability of each data visualization concept itself were evaluated. Counter-intuitive findings, such as a desire for "big picture" visualization but with filtering on key topics or people of interest, and divergent preferences among users emerged. In addition, several "modes of operation" were identified to help explain the variety of responses and highlight the competing information processing issues users contend with to achieve their goals.