Bicentric diagrams: Design and applications of a graph-based relational set visualization technique

•Interactive visualizations amplify human cognition and augment decision making.•Bicentric diagrams enable identification of sets, relationships, and reach.•Bicentric diagrams enable visual exploration of strong and weak ties.•Study provides illustrative examples from commerce, news, research, and strategy.•Value-driven expert evaluation reveals utility and usefulness of bicentric diagrams.

In an era where data on social, economic, and physical networks are proliferating at a rapid pace, the ability to understand the underlying complex structural connections, discover prominent entities, and identify clusters is becoming increasingly important. It is also well-established that interactive visualizations can amplify human cognition and augment decision making. Motivated by a practical need articulated by corporate decision makers and limitations of existing visual representations, this research presents our journey in designing and implementing bicentric diagrams, a novel graph-based set visualization technique. A bicentric diagram enables simultaneous identification of sets, set relationships, and set member reach in integrated egonetworks of two focal entities. Our technique builds on the well-established sociological theory of tie strength to visually group and position nodes. We illustrate the broad applicability of bicentric diagrams with examples from four diverse sample domains: university collaboration, technology co-occurrence, health app purchases, and interfirm alliance networks. We assess the value of our technique using an expert-based evaluation approach. The paper concludes with implications and a discussion of opportunities for implementation in real-world decision support settings.