BulB – VISUALISING BULLETIN BOARD ACTIVITY

Rehman Mohamed, John Ferguson, David Elsweiler, Alasdair Mac Cormick, John Wilson,

George Weir

Department of Computer & Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde

26 Richmond Street, Glasgow, G1 1XH, Scotland, UK

Keywords: Online Communities, Bulletin Boards, Visualisation, Discussion Forum

Abstract: Visualisation is well known as an effectiv

e means of enriching user interaction with complex systems.

Recent research with online communities has considered the application of visualisation tool support, with

the intention of further improving communication between community members. This paper reviews

existing work in this area with specific reference to the application of visualisation to improve user

interaction within online forums such as bulletin boards. The paper then outlines work undertaken by the

authors to develop a second-generation visualisation tool - ‘BulB’.

1 INTRODUCTION

Online communities are now widespread and form

useful forums, unrestrained by geographical

boundaries, for groups who identify and interact

around common, purposeful and mutually beneficial

interests. Online communities are dynamic,

constantly changing systems. They exhibit ‘organic’

growth, evolving through different phases, reflecting

changes in the needs of their members, changes in

the social setting, or changes in the support

infrastructure (Malhotra et al, 1997; Liedka, 1999;

Squire and Johnson, 2000).

There is growing evidence that many online

mmunities fail to fulfil their purpose due to lack of

involvement by members (Kim, 2000). Further,

while many online communities are supported

through the use of communication services such as

bulletin boards, chat rooms etc, there is also

evidence that the provision of these facilities alone is

insufficient to engender a sense of community: there

are many examples of websites offering these

facilities with little or no participation (Kim, 2000;

Mohamed et al, 2002). In order to be successful they

must be built on solid foundations. Successful online

communities need to be organized and adopted by

the community; members must have a shared

purpose and be willing to openly share information.

They grow and thrive when members are able to

fulfil that purpose and accomplish those goals that

require other members to participate in the

community (Ferguson et al, 2002).

The concept of community is normally

associated wit

h interaction and shared co-presence,

whereas the typical contact between user and a

website is on the whole a solitary experience with

few visual clues of other participants and their

activity. The work outlined in this paper is aimed at

facilitating member communication within bulletin

boards and engendering a feeling of co-presence

akin to ‘face-to-face’ interaction.

This paper outlines the case for the use of

sualisations as a driver for enhancing

communication within online communities. It then

proceeds to review previous work on visualisations

within the context of bulletin board support. The

authors have been working to develop a second

generation visualization tool that embodies lessons

learned from earlier work. This system is known as

‘BulB’ and provides an enhanced range of features

that enable community members to easily assimilate

bulletin board activity.

2 VISUALISING ONLINE

INTERACTION

One of the largest problems faced in trying to sustain

online communities is that of withdrawal or attrition

(Johnson, 2001; Haythornthwaite et al, 2000). This

Mohamed R., Ferguson J., Elsweiler D., Mac Cormick A., Wilson J. and Weir G. (2004).

BulB – VISUALISING BULLETIN BOARD ACTIVITY.

In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 31-35

DOI: 10.5220/0002640800310035

 SciTePress

may be a direct result of the prevalent text-based

representations which tend to suggest uniformity and

ennui rather than the lively social scene that is

actually present (Donath, 2002). Furthermore, text-

based representations tend to be unclear and require

extensive user participation in order to gain a

holistic view of the interaction environment and

context. Therefore, there is a requirement for good

facilitation techniques and social scaffolding to

support online communication technology. Donath

(1996) identifies three important areas in the design

of software aimed at supporting successful online

communities: visualisation of social phenomena, the

role of information spaces as contexts for

communication, and the presentation of the user in

the virtual world.

Instruments that encourage greater contribution,

raising levels of communication and feelings of

kinship, will enable interaction and remove barriers

that lead to lack of involvement and community

stagnation. One such technique is the use of

visualisations to augment and enhance existing

communication technologies such as bulletin boards.

Visual representation of social phenomena is

important in the design of successful software to

support online communities (Donath, 2002). In the

real world, individuals use social cues and

information from other people in order to find their

way and inform decisions. Social navigation cues

are also valuable in the digital domain, with the

movement of people around online communities and

activity within chat rooms or bulletin boards helping

to guide or inform decisions (Dieberger et al, 2000).

A key challenge of information visualisation is

inventing visual metaphors and developing new

ways of manipulating existing metaphors to make

sense of information (Eick, 2001).

Visualisation tools have already been applied

successfully to track and display, in a graphical

format, the distribution of users on a web site (Minar

and Donath, 2001). Much of the existing work is

general in nature, whereas this paper applies similar

concepts to visualising the activities of members

within a community bulletin board.

It is expected that the use of visualisation tools

will enrich the user’s experience within an online

community and lead to benefits such as reinforcing

the immediacy of the shared experience through the

use of visual cues and indicators, thus enabling

online community participation and sustainability.

Social navigation cues are as valuable in online

communities as they are in the real world. People

require indicators that allow them to make decisions

and interact (Dieberger et al, 2000). Within an

online community, these indicators enable users to

access and assess activities within different

functional areas such as chat rooms, bulletin boards,

etc.

3 BULLETIN BOARD

VISUALISATION TOOLS

There are a number of enhanced interfaces and

visualisation techniques that are currently being used

successfully to promote user interaction with the

web. Examples include WebFan (Xiong and

Brittain, 1999) and PeopleGarden (Xiong and

Donath, 1999). WebFan visualises web-based

bulletin board activity using a fan-like hierarchical

structure, allowing web pages with multiple threads

to be represented at the same time for overview and

comparison purposes. Threads are incorporated into

a fan-like structure, and lines on the fan change

colour to depict that a given posting has been read.

While WebFan enables the user to gain an

overview of postings and replies, it fails to include a

range of elements which would be useful to potential

users. Through looking at the visualisation, it is not

possible to ascertain which users have posted which

messages. Such a feature would be helpful to

potential users in order to get an overall picture of

posting patterns and of the most prolific users within

the bulletin board. Furthermore, there is no

indication of temporal thread development which

would allow a user to see how long a thread has

been active, the length of time between postings in a

thread and the comparative timeline of each thread.

PeopleGarden uses a flower and garden

metaphor to visualise user activity within a bulletin

board. Each bulletin board participant is represented

by a flower with the long plant-like stems depicting

the length of time the user has been an active

participant. Petals are used to signify each post that

has been made with red signifying initial postings

and blue for replies. Collections of flowers, or

gardens, are used to depict the contributions and

posting patterns of every participant within the

bulletin board.

Although PeopleGarden provides an excellent

visualisation of the behaviour pattern of members

and their contribution levels, it does not give users

information about the size of threads, the length of

time that threads have been ongoing or the

distribution of users across threads in the bulletin

board.

Babble (Erickson and Kellogg, 2000; Erickson et

al, 2002) makes use of ‘social proxies’ to graphically

represent users and their activities as a means of

supporting long-term conversations within existing

groups. Through making careful choices about

which social cues to reveal or suppress, they

ICEIS 2004 - SOFTWARE AGENTS AND INTERNET COMPUTING

designed several environments to support a range of

various types of interaction. These visually-enable

environments allow users to draw inferences about

current activity and consequently, shape the

collective activity of the group. In one such

environment, the “Timeline” social proxy is used to

support asynchronous conversations, leaving traces

when users log in and when they contribute to

conversations. While not applied directly to a

bulletin board, this visualisation helps in

understanding the usage patterns of the community,

highlighting ‘hot’ times when people tend to log in

or have a say.

4 BulB

The BulB visualisation approach, drawing influence

from prior work on visualising bulletin board

activity, aims to shed light on communication

patterns and examine the growth of conversations

within bulletin boards. In constructing a

visualisation of bulletin board activity, it was

deemed important to draw each thread separately so

that users could immediately see the distribution of

threads and identify which threads in particular were

livelier. Through keeping the colour of each

contributor consistent across all threads in the

visualisation, BulB enables users to instantly see

which contributors are most active across all threads.

In addition, this allows a user to easily identify the

distribution of individuals posting to a particular

thread and across the bulletin board as a whole.

The key features of BulB are:

• A stem, or stalk, to represent each thread.

• The height of each stalk represents the total

time that each thread has been active, from

the first post to the current time. Longer

stalks represent threads that have been going

longer.

• A unique colour is used to represent each

user. This colour is consistent across all

threads being visualised.

In addition to browsing through the bulletin

board in the normal way, BulB enables users to

navigate throughout the bulletin board by clicking

on the visualisation applet; the webpage for each

appropriate thread is loaded on a mouse click.

Further, when users mouse over anywhere within the

height of each thread, the thread title appears at the

bottom of the visualisation panel. Similarly when

moving the mouse over the coloured segment for

each user, their username appears at the foot of the

visualisation panel. Through providing this

information, it is easier from a user’s perspective to

compare threads and also examine the activity of

particular contributors across threads.

There are three separate visualisations within

BulB:

• Temporal thread development (Figure 1a)

• User thread participation (Figure 1b)

• Timeline (Figure 1c)

4.1 Temporal Thread Development

In this visualisation, the stalk-head is used to show

the development of the thread since it started.

Figure 1: Sample BulB Visualisations

BULB – VISUALISING BULLETIN BOARD ACTIVITY

Segments are drawn to signify each new post with

livelier threads having more segments. The stalk-

head circumference is scaled to represent the

timeline of every thread. Each segment in the head is

drawn clockwise around the circumference and the

position of each segment represents the time the post

was made in relation to the time the thread was

created.

Figure 2 shows a small thread with three posts,

each contributed by three different users. Given that

there has been a week since this thread was started,

it can be seen that the first reply to the initial post

was not made until midway through the fifth day,

and the final post in the thread was made a day ago -

six days after the thread was started.

4.2 User Thread Participation

This visualisation draws a pie chart as a stalk-head.

The pie signifies the proportion of each thread that is

made up by each contributor. Each slice of the pie

chart constitutes the percentage of each thread made

up by a particular user’s posts.

The visualisation extract in Figure 2 shows a set

of 3 threads. Thread a has a single post from one

contributor, Visualisation b shows a thread with one

dominant contributor, while thread c depicts a more

even spread of users.

4.3 Timeline

Unlike the previous two BulB visualisations, where

the bulletin board posts are drawn at the top of each

stalk, the Timeline distributes posts along the height

of each thread stalk. Each post is drawn at the

appropriate position on the Timeline, depending

upon when the post was made in relation to the

length of time that the thread has been active.

The Timeline visualisation in Figure 2 shows

three threads, the middle of which has a small flurry

of activity within a short time period. There are a

total of 4 posts shown, with the red oval depicting

that there are 2 posts close to each other and which

are overlapping on the visualisation.

4.4 BulB Settings

Users can customise BulB through using a settings

panel in order to get different views of the bulletin

board activity.

As previously outlined, users can choose

between one of the three different visualisations

depending upon their circumstances and preferences.

Other settings include the ability to filter the number

of threads that are drawn within the visualisation at

any time. For example, users can choose to visualise

only the five most popular threads within the

bulletin board at any time. In addition, users can

change the way that threads are filtered, opting to

display the most popular threads over a give time

period, or visualise the threads with the most recent

posts. Users can also filter each view by time-scale.

For example, visualising the most active threads

over the last week. All of these settings can be

combined to give fully customisable visualisations

depending upon the user’s requirements.

4.5 Using BulB

From looking at all BulB visualisations, it is easy to

see which threads have been active longest through

studying the length of each stalk. Similarly, users

can easily identify frequent contributors across

multiple threads by looking for the reoccurrence of

colours within the visualisations (see Figure 1).

Initial results from user trials have shown that

different visualisations are more helpful in certain

circumstances. The ‘Timeline’ and ‘Temporal

Thread Development’ visualisations aid in

identifying ‘hot’ points in a thread where there is a

flurry of posts in a short time period. The ‘Timeline’

visualisation has proved especially successful in

such circumstances given that posts are distributed

in a larger area along the height of the thread.

The User Thread Participation visualisation has

proved most helpful to users in identifying repeat

contributors across threads. Given that posts from

the same user are group together in a pie, users can

easily spot if there is an even distribution of

contributors in a particular thread, or whether there

are dominant users.

Figure 2: BulB Visualisation extracts

ICEIS 2004 - SOFTWARE AGENTS AND INTERNET COMPUTING

4.6 Areas for Further Research

There are several directions for future work related

to BulB. Formal user testing is underway to test the

usability of the system, and also to assess which

visualisations prove most successful in which

situations. The results of these tests will be useful in

modelling profiles of user interaction. BulB may

also be modified to visualise activity in other

communication areas such as Usenet newsgroups

and chat rooms.

5 CONCLUSION

Visualisation techniques have proven to be an

effective means of promoting user interaction with

complex systems. In this paper, the authors have

reviewed a number of visualisation tools aimed

specifically at promoting and enhancing user

interaction within online communities and

specifically bulletin boards.

This paper has introduced BulB, a second-

generation tool embodying a range of visualisations

and addressing some of the limitations of existing

tools. BulB elucidates communication patterns

within bulletin boards, enabling users to observe the

growth of conversations. Preliminary feedback on

the utility of these visualisations looks promising

and the authors are currently undertaking an in-depth

evaluation of their effectiveness through a series of

user trials.

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BULB – VISUALISING BULLETIN BOARD ACTIVITY