Soulmate or Acquaintance? Visualizing Tie Strength for Trust Inference

摘要

Prior social science research has shown that tie strength is a useful indicator of context-dependent trust in many real-world relationships. Yet, it is often challenging to gauge trust in online environments. Given a multitude of variables that represent social relationships, we explore how to visualize interpersonal tie strength to empower people to make informed, context-dependent online trust decisions. Our goal is to develop visualizations that are meaningful, expressive, and comprehensible. In this paper, we describe the design of four visualizations. We also report on the results of two user studies, where users commented that our visualizations are highly comprehensive, meaningful, and easy to understand.