y academic work focuses on investigating visualization solutions to apply to the issue that information overload brings to decision making. In order to be confident and satisfied in the decisions that are made in personal, economic, or business, a person has to have as much information as they can to make informed decisions. The problem that frequently occurs however, is that the abundance of information creates such overwhelming option degrees as to inhibit the decision making process. In many instances in order to avoid this anxiety, people tend to make the same decisions many times over, or choose not to decide. However this is not always the process that will lead to a satisfying relationship, financial portfolio, or business solution.
have chosen to focus my current research effort on the phenomena of social decision making and the types of information navigation strategies that increase a person’s awareness of their decision making patterns and how these decisions affect the composition of their social network. Through a visualization tool that will display the interaction history gathered from online and offline data resources (email, IM, telephone, mail) I will display the interaction history of a person with the others within their data defined social network over a period of time. Through this visualization a person would be able to see, within this vast amount of interaction information, the types of media they have a tendency to focus their communication through, the degree of social distance that they have between network contacts of differing subgroups, and how their interaction with network contacts compares to the inter-network interaction between those that are in the network.

hrough the investigation of their interaction patterns, I will analyze the differences between a person’s perceived interaction practices and their actual data defined practices. From this analysis I hope to gain insight into whether this awareness would change a person’s decision making practices in reference to the management and growth of one’s social network and that the continuation of the monitoring of such information increases a person’s ability to understand their choices and be more satisfied with them and the outcome of their networks.