Linear-time Diagram: A Set Visualisation Technique for Personal Visualisation

to Understand Social Interactions over Time

Mithileysh Sathiyanarayanan & Donato PirozziCity, University of London, U.K.

IEEE International Conference on Contemporary Computing and Informatics (IC3I)

Amity University, Noida, India

14th-16th December 2016

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What do we intend to cover?

Why the topic? Why Personal Visualisations? Related Work Design Challenges Linear-time Diagram Questions-driven Workshop Outcomes of the Workshop Conclusion & Future Work Questions

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Why the topic?

With the advent of pervasive social networks and social communication media, people are connected all the time and messages arrive endlessly on their devices, generating an enormous quantity of personal content, such as: textual messages, photos, audio clips and videos.

However, when an individual desires to go back in the time, recalling or reflecting on what happened months ago about his/her conversation with friends, he/she needs to continuously frenzy scroll over all the past messages and so far there is no visualisation support that can help in recalling personal chats.

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Why Personal Visualisations?

Recently, visualisations for personal use are emerging as a prominent tool for Personal Visual Analysis (PVA). Users themselves desire to gain insight on their own data and communities they are involved.

Visualisations can be exploited as a tool for personal data analytics, displaying personal interactions - for instance the ones recorded during the mobile instant messaging apps or web application apps.

The variety of devices, the non-professional target users with no experience in data analysis, variety of usage conditions and places (e.g., in crowded places) and tasks, pose new design challenges to visualisation designers.

Related Work

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Personal Visualisation & Personal Visual Analytics Set Visualisations

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Design Challenges

Visualisation for an individual Visualising for an individual

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Linear-time Diagrams

Set Inclusion Set Exclusion Set Intersection

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Question-driven Workshop

1)  Do you think you need a visualisation tool to represent how you have interacted with your friends on social media (ex: Facebook) over a particular period of time? 2)  If yes, are you impressed with any current visualisation tools for the Facebook? Which are the ones? 3)  What do you think about the current visualisations (as shown in the pictures)? 4)  Do you like our visualisation approach (as shown in the pictures)? 5)  Can you identify most conversation the individual had with his/her friend? 6)  Can you identify which all the friends the individual had more conversation with? 7)  Can you identify during which particular time-frame, more conversations had taken place and with whom?

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General Outcomes of the Workshop

From the workshop discussions, we understand that the conversation people had in their social networking space must be represented such that it is simple, elegant, user-friendly and easy to understand.

Most of them have struggled to understand to whom they have had conversation the most and find it difficult to monitor it manually on a regular basis. They are not impressed with the current tools that represent all the friends as a graph (network) and not about the conversations.

The participants liked our Linear-time diagrams that represent set relationships and time-frame for a personal visualisation. So, the participants were able to identify:

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Positives of our tool

Our Linear-time diagrams are simple, elegant, user- friendly and easy to understand.

Our Linear-time diagrams are in a linear format that helps in identifying set relationships over time (i.e., friendship strength represented through conversation during particular time-frame).

The simple visualisation tools like Linear-time diagrams will help to maximise their impact and memorability.

The evolution of the conversation with many individuals (existing and new friends) can be monitored, which will keep the individuals

engaged in using the tool.

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Limitations of our tool

The tool is not an interactive-friendly and can be enhanced with filtering, selecting and sorting techniques based on time, messages and/or individuals.

The tool can be improved to navigate easily, analyse and interpret data efficiently.

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Future Works

As future work we desire to further explore the usage of Linear-diagrams through a mobile touch user interface to visualise mobile instant messaging interactions.

Furthermore, the proposed technique can be exploited not only by displaying the users interactions, but also to navigate, explore and filter data by tapping with the finger on the coloured boxes.

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Questions