Who talks to whom: an evaluation of a call log visualization

Abstract

Adding temporal information to social network visualizations is still a challenging task despite previous research efforts. Visualizing call logs on an event-based level can show various attributes of a connection. The dimension time is of great interest to analysts as it offers insights into trends and patterns such as changing relationships between different actors or economic opportunities for businesses. Yet current approaches suffer from limitations that can be improved with the visualization design presented in this work. Our presented visualization was developed considering aesthetic criteria and characteristics of adjacency matrices and node-link diagrams. A heuristic evaluation according to these criteria was conducted. In a formative evaluation process, an artificial dataset was specifically created to examine dynamic social networks. A qualitative user study with observation and think-aloud protocols was conducted and analyzed with regard to the user’s strategies, limitations of the visualization and potential additional features. The visualization appears to be suitable for all of the evaluated network tasks; however, path-related tasks were more challenging than other tasks. Graphical abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.]