We introduce CommunityCompare, a visual analytic system to enable online community leaders to make sense of their community’s activity with comparisons.
Emma, an online community leader, wants to learn how she might increase member visits (views) by looking at example communities that are doing well on this metric. Each line in the main chart represents a community; Emma’s community is highlighted in orange. She wants to find example communities that have similar size and age compared to her community, and at the same time have more views than hers. To achieve this, she creates two visual filters on the community size and community age axes around her community, and creates another filter on the views axis above her community. She now sees 8 communities shown in the main chart and listed in the Select Communitieswidget. She wants to know what has been posted in these communities, so she clicks on the name of each community in the list to view their Most Valuable Posts below. She sees several examples of posts that give her new ideas for discussion topics in her community. She then saves the list of communities and decides to contact the leaders to learn more about their activities.
We motivate and inform the system design with formative interviews of community leaders. From additional interviews, a field deployment, and surveys of leaders, we show how the system enabled leaders to assess community performance in the context of other comparable communities, learn about community dynamics through data exploration, and identify examples of top performing communities from which to learn.
For more, see our full paper, CommunityCompare: Visually Comparing Communities for Online Community Leaders in the Enterprise.
Anbang Xu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Jilin Chen, IBM Research – Almaden
Tara Matthews, IBM Research – Almaden
Michael Muller, IBM Research – Cambridge
Hernan Badenes, IBM Research – Almaden