CommunityCompare: visually comparing communities for online community leaders in the enterprise

Online communities are important in enterprises, helping workers to build skills and collaborate. Despite their unique and critical role fostering successful communities, community leaders have little direct support in existing technologies. We introduce CommunityCompare, an interactive visual analytic system to enable leaders to make sense of their community's activity with comparisons. Composed of a parallel coordinates plot, various control widgets, and a preview of example posts from communities, the system supports comparisons with hundreds of related communities on multiple metrics and the ability to learn by example. We motivate and inform the system design with formative interviews of community leaders. From additional interviews, a field deployment, and surveys of leaders, we show how the system enabled leaders to assess community performance in the context of other comparable communities, learn about community dynamics through data exploration, and identify examples of top performing communities from which to learn. We conclude by discussing how our system and design lessons generalize.