Exploring user-centric interpersonal relationships in social networks using information visualization techniques

In the Web 2.0 era, many social networking services have rapidly emerged. For helping users interactively explore characteristics of these social communities, different visualization tools are proposed to present the social networks with a panoramic view. However, most visualization tools do not consider the issue of effectively exploring interpersonal relationships from a single user perspective. In this paper, we discuss this issue using various information visualization techniques to help end-users efficiently discover detailed individual information. To study the usability, we performed user studies to compare our system with a typical text-based interface. The preliminary experiment results show that our visualization design significantly reduces the searching time cost to help the subjects efficiently find information.