Welcome to
The business problem
Sequence explorer is an approach to provide insights into business questions like:
- what steps do users typically take on your web site?
- how do typical customer journeys look like?
- how do patients respond to different treatments over time?
- ...
For this class of questions, the large number of combinations poses a severe practical challenge. Due to the explorative nature, an intuitive visualization is well-suited for such business questions. More specifically, a visualization can provide a unique representation for both revealing insights and for intuitive user interaction based on business knowledge or own hypotheses.
The new approach: sequence explorer
The basic idea of sequence explorer is to visualize events over time or any other sequence. The underlying visualization is a sankey diagram with the events and the time units forming a fixed grid. As a result, occurences of the same event are depicted by rectangles at the same horizontal position whereas different events at the same time are rectangles aligned at the same vertical position.
The height of a rectangle denotes the frequency of this event at that particular time and the thickness of a path connecting two rectangles (events) corresponds to the number of occurences of these two events in that particular order.
The interactive exploration is supported in the following ways:
- tooltips denote various quantities and proportions
- small multiples support multiple views of related sequences can be explored simultaneously
- global and local scaling allows for analyzing the sequences with different scales
- overlaid node info facilitates the break down of each event into different properties
- horizontal and vertical views highlight specific events or points in time
- particle flows animate the journey of users (or your measured quantity) along specified paths
Feel free to jump right to the links to a demo, a video, and the source code on github.