Social network analysis (SNA) is becoming increasingly concerned not only with actors and their relations, but also with distinguishing between different types of such entities. For example, social scientists may want to investigate asymmetric relations in organizations with strict chains of command, or incorporate non-actors such as conferences and projects when analyzing co-authorship patterns. Multimodal social networks are those where actors and relations belong to different types, or modes, and multimodal social network analysis (mSNA) is accordingly SNA for such networks. In this paper, we present a design study that we conducted with several social scientist collaborators on how to support mSNA using visual analytics tools. Based on an open-ended, formative design process, we devised a visual representation called parallel node-link bands (PNLBs) that splits modes into separate bands and renders connections between adjacent ones, similar to the list view in Jigsaw. We then used the tool in a qualitative evaluation involving five social scientists whose feedback informed a second design phase that incorporated additional network metrics. Finally, we conducted a second qualitative evaluation with our social scientist collaborators that provided further insights on the utility of the PNLBs representation and the potential of visual analytics for mSNA.

Time is a universal and essential aspect of data in any investigative analysis. It helps analysts establish causality, build storylines from evidence, and reject infeasible hypotheses. For this reason, many investigative analysis tools provide visual representations designed for making sense of temporal data. However, the field of visual analytics still needs more evidence explaining how temporal visualization actually aids the analysis process, as well as design recommendations for how to build these visualizations. To fill this gap, we conducted an insight-based qualitative study to investigate the influence of temporal visualization on investigative analysis. We found that visualizing temporal information helped participants externalize chains of events. Another contribution of our work is the lightweight evaluation approach used to collect, visualize, and analyze insight.

Direct manipulation has had major influence on interface design since it was proposed by Shneiderman in 1982. Although directness generally benefits users, direct manipulation also has weaknesses. In some cases, such as when a user needs to manipulate small, attribute-rich objects or multiple objects simultaneously, indirect manipulation may be more efficient at the cost of directness or intuitiveness of the interaction. Several techniques have been developed over the years to address these issues, but these are all isolated and limited efforts with no coherent underlying principle. We propose the notion of Surrogate Interaction that ties together a large subset of these techniques through the use of a surrogate object that allow users to interact with the surrogate instead of the domain object. We believe that formalizing this family of interaction techniques will provide an additional and powerful interface design alternative for interaction designers, as well as uncover opportunities for future research.