Kwon Bum Chul, Kim Sung-Hee, Lee Sukwon, Choo Jaegul, Huh Jina, Yi Ji Soo
IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2016 Jan;22(1):71-80. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2015.2467555.
Through online health communities (OHCs), patients and caregivers exchange their illness experiences and strategies for overcoming the illness, and provide emotional support. To facilitate healthy and lively conversations in these communities, their members should be continuously monitored and nurtured by OHC administrators. The main challenge of OHC administrators' tasks lies in understanding the diverse dimensions of conversation threads that lead to productive discussions in their communities. In this paper, we present a design study in which three domain expert groups participated, an OHC researcher and two OHC administrators of online health communities, which was conducted to find with a visual analytic solution. Through our design study, we characterized the domain goals of OHC administrators and derived tasks to achieve these goals. As a result of this study, we propose a system called VisOHC, which visualizes individual OHC conversation threads as collapsed boxes-a visual metaphor of conversation threads. In addition, we augmented the posters' reply authorship network with marks and/or beams to show conversation dynamics within threads. We also developed unique measures tailored to the characteristics of OHCs, which can be encoded for thread visualizations at the users' requests. Our observation of the two administrators while using VisOHC showed that it supports their tasks and reveals interesting insights into online health communities. Finally, we share our methodological lessons on probing visual designs together with domain experts by allowing them to freely encode measurements into visual variables.
通过在线健康社区（OHC），患者和护理人员交流他们的疾病经历以及战胜疾病的策略，并提供情感支持。为了促进这些社区内健康且活跃的对话，OHC管理员应持续对其成员进行监督和培养。OHC管理员任务的主要挑战在于理解对话线程的不同维度，这些维度能在其社区中引发富有成效的讨论。在本文中，我们展示了一项设计研究，有三个领域专家小组参与其中，一位OHC研究人员以及两个在线健康社区的OHC管理员，该研究旨在通过视觉分析解决方案来找到相关方法。通过我们的设计研究，我们明确了OHC管理员的领域目标，并得出实现这些目标的任务。作为这项研究的结果，我们提出了一个名为VisOHC的系统，它将单个OHC对话线程可视化为折叠框——对话线程的一种视觉隐喻。此外，我们用标记和/或光束增强了发帖者的回复作者网络，以展示线程内的对话动态。我们还开发了针对OHC特点的独特度量，可根据用户请求为线程可视化进行编码。我们观察了两位管理员使用VisOHC的情况，结果表明它支持他们的任务，并揭示了关于在线健康社区的有趣见解。最后，我们分享了与领域专家一起探索视觉设计的方法经验，即允许他们自由地将度量编码为视觉变量。
