ComViewer: An Interactive Visual Tool to Help Viewers Seek Social Support in Online Mental Health Communities

TL;DR

ComViewer is an interactive visual tool that enhances the experience of seeking social support in online mental health communities by enabling filtering, summarization, and interactive exploration of posts and comments.

Contribution

This work introduces ComViewer, a novel visual tool powered by LLMs that improves support-seeking in OMHCs through interactive filtering, summarization, and sensemaking features.

Findings

Participants found ComViewer more engaging and easier to use.

ComViewer increased the effectiveness of support-seeking compared to baseline.

The tool facilitated better understanding and exploration of community content.

Abstract

Online mental health communities (OMHCs) offer rich posts and comments for viewers, who do not directly participate in the communications, to seek social support from others' experience. However, viewers could face challenges in finding helpful posts and comments and digesting the content to get needed support, as revealed in our formative study (N=10). In this work, we present an interactive visual tool named ComViewer to help viewers seek social support in OMHCs. With ComViewer, viewers can filter posts of different topics and find supportive comments via a zoomable circle packing visual component that adapts to searched keywords. Powered by LLM, ComViewer supports an interactive sensemaking process by enabling viewers to interactively highlight, summarize, and question any community content. A within-subjects study (N=20) demonstrates ComViewer's strengths in providing viewers with a more simplified, more fruitful, and more engaging support-seeking experience compared to a baseline OMHC interface without ComViewer. We further discuss design implications for facilitating information-seeking and sense making in online mental health communities.