Usability Study of a Semantic User Model Visualization for Social Networks
Fedor Bakalov, Birgitta König‐Ries, Tobias Hennig, Gabriele Schade · 2011
In this paper, we report on a usability study of the Introspective-Views interface for visualizing semantic user models in social net-works. In the first part of this paper, we describe how the inter-face can be used in a social network for visualizing and editing ontology-based user interest models. In the second part, we de-scribe the study we conducted to evaluate the usability of this vi-sualization. We describe the results of four evaluation methods: task-based experiment, eye tracking, interviewing, and a question-naire. The contributions of this paper are three-fold: First, it describes an application of the IntrospectiveViews interface to user model visu-alization in social networks. Second, it describes and exemplifies a methodology to usability evaluation of interactive visualizations of user models. Third, it reports on the outcomes of such an eval-uation: It identifies what visual techniques and interaction patterns users deem to be usable and attractive for working with models of their interests, but it also reports on the crucial usability problems of the interface and describes possible solutions to these problems. We believe that the latter two contributions to be of interest for researchers working on similar interfaces for visualization of user models.