EVOLVING A SOCIAL VISUALIZATION DESIGN AIMED AT INCREASING PARTICIPATION IN A CLASS-BASED ONLINE COMMUNITY
The paper describes the evolution of the design of a motivational social visualization. The visualization shows the contributions of users to an online community to encourage social comparison and more participation. The newest design overcomes shortcomings in the previous two, by using more attractive appearance of the graphic elements in the visualization, better clustering algorithm and by giving up the largely unused in the previous design user customization options. The visualization integrates more information in one view, and uses an improved user clustering approach for representing graphically their different levels of contribution. A case study of the new design with a group of 32 students taking a class on Ethics and Computer Science is presented. The results show that the visualization had a significant effect on participation with respect to two activities (logging into the community and rating resources).