OpinionBlocks: Visualizing Consumer Reviews

Every day, vast numbers of customer reviews are accessed on retail or online services websites. Although valuable information can be gleaned from reviews, these sources are underutilized both by consumers and businesses due to their unstructured nature, serial presentation, limited search tools, and low ratio of useful information to the overall amount of data (high noise). OpinionBlocks is an interactive visualization tool to help people better understand customer reviews. It is designed to progressively disclose increasingly detailed textual information from various reviews while continuously providing visual graphical summaries. The visualization initially exposes text at the keyword level, and then exposes snippets that the keywords are used in, and finally shows the snippets within the context of an entire review. We provide interactive tools to let users navigate across different text granularities in an intuitive way and additionally, utilize smooth animations to preserve context across views.