Usability Study of a Semantic User Model Visualization for Social Networks

In this paper, we report on a usability study of the IntrospectiveViews interface for visualizing semantic user models in social networks. In the first part of this paper, we describe how the interface can be used in a social network for visualizing and editing ontology-based user interest models. In the second part, we describe the study we conducted to evaluate the usability of this visualization. We describe the results of four evaluation methods: task-based experiment, eye tracking, interviewing, and a questionnaire. The contributions of this paper are three-fold: First, it describes an application of the IntrospectiveViews interface to user model visualization 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 evaluation: 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.