3 New Features For More Powerful Network Visualization

In case you haven’t seen Polinode in action before - it’s a tool for mapping, visualizing and analysing networks in the browser. With Polinode you can either create Networks, Surveys or both. Polinode Networks gives you the ability to upload any network data you may have to the cloud and then visualize and analyze that data directly from your browser. The source of the data can literally be anything including email communication, 360 degree performance reviews, enterprise social networks, social media, etc.

Polinode Surveys allow you to collect network data using a relationship-based survey tool. For example, you can ask questions such as “Who do you work with often?” or “Who do you go to for advice?”. You can then visualize and analyze this network data in one integrated and highly flexible solution. Applications are many and varied but include change management, identifying emerging talent, M&A integration and improving workplace layouts. This is what we call 'Survey’ functionality and it is most often used for organizational network analysis.

Announcing 3 new features

We are thrilled with all of the feature requests we've been getting over the last couple of months! Today we are announcing three improvements designed to help you more effectively and efficiently visualize networks:

1. Improved selection of nodes

You have always been able to select groups of nodes in Polinode using either your mouse or a number of shortcut keys but from today unselected nodes will be rendered as transparent. This reduces clutter in the network and makes it easier for you to understand the relationships that exist and which nodes you have selected.

In the above animation the user has simply left-clicked on a node to select that node and its neighbours and then right-clicked outside of any nodes to clear the selection.

2. New default colors for nodes

Polinode has always given you the ability to select your own colors for nodes and to color nodes by any attribute, either categorical attributes such as "Male" and "Female" or numerical attributes such as "Age". We heard your feedback though about the default set of colors used for nodes - that you would like the default colors to be more distinct from each other. As you can see from the above we've updated these default colors.

3. More edge sizing options        

We have also introduced the concept of thresholds to edge sizing, which gives you a much greater degree of control over the relative size of edges in your networks. So, now you can set the thresholds for both node and edge sizing using a simple slider for each.