A New Way to Visualize LumApps Interest Following

LumApps is a popular enterprise social collaboration and employee experience platform that is gaining tons of traction among both large and small enterprises. One of its powerful features is the ability to subscribe to an interest, which is a combination of content type and associated metadata. This feature is unique to LumApps and was one of the most challenging data types we’ve experienced so far in terms of visualization. Fortunately, we finally found a nice way to visualize it as a Sankey diagram. Our visualization is presented in the screenshot above.

Just like the whole concept of interest following, this visualization has multiple dimensions and is a bit tricky to read at first (but you will perfect this skill it in a moment):

• On the left side, you can see the list of users who have subscribed to at least one interest.
• In this example, we only have four synthetic users who have subscribed to something.
• In the top-right corner, you can also see “Not subscribed: 39,” which counts the number of users in the system that haven’t subscribed to any interest.
• The second layer of the Sankey diagram represents different content types that the users have subscribed to, disregarding any metadata. This layer will give you a generic idea of what types of content the users are most interested in.
• The third layer displays the combination of the content type and metadata, so expect a lot more segmentation in this layer. Still, it will highlight the most popular metadata that the users are interested in.
• Finally, the last layer shows the list of users (again), thus allowing you to review the data in both directions.

Like most Sherpa’s visualizations, this one is interactive, so you can quickly identify users who have subscribed to certain types of data by hovering over the specific segment:

Do you have any other ideas about how to visualize this kind of data? Feel free to contact us via our website or a DM on LinkedIn, and we’ll be happy to discuss.