Adobe Prototypes a Constellation Interface for Exploring Ideas

BrightIdea has been working with Adobe to manage their innovation. Now a prototype graph visualization built by Asterisq is being featured on their online "WebStorm" for Acrobat, found at http://ideas.acrobat.com.

Collecting and Visualizing Ideas

BrightIdea's WebStorm platform is a content management system for ideas. Employees submit their ideas to company-hosted campaigns and vote on each other's submissions. They also have an API which allows developers to grab the data and take it further.

That's where Asterisq comes in. Constellation Framework was used to build a custom graph visualization for BrightIdea and Adobe. The interface allows users to explore submissions and their tag relationships in an engaging manner.

The GraphViz Interface

The custom visualization explores the tag space using a behavior similar to Roamer. Clicking a node shows its neighborhood and the nodes are arranged using a force-directed layout.

Asterisq implemented a mouse hovering zoom behavior which makes it easy to view the full idea title while still maintaining the context of the visualization. Double-clicking takes you to the idea's URL.

There's also a popout sidebar which gives additional information about the selected node. It also contains an autocomplete tag search and history functionality.

This is only a prototype so the UI isn't polished and there are features we feel are missing, such as the ability to quickly vote on ideas and dynamically-loaded data to improve start up time. Still, it's very exciting to have Constellation put to good use by a company like Adobe!

• Check out the Acrobat.com Ideas Visualization.