One of the main differentiators between views made in an Exaptive Studio or Cognitive City vs. other visualization systems is that they are meant to be bi-directional. That is, the goal is not for users to not just view the visualization, but to interact with it in a way that produces new data in the process.

You can support this by adding buttons to any view that can be thought of as calls to action. They ask users to think about what they are seeing and enter some data as a result. The view will update with their entries, giving them immediate feedback and possibly leading to subsequent calls to action.

To add your own action buttons, click on the cog icon in the upper left corner of the view and then experiment with changing the controls associated with the view.


A particularly useful feature when trying to create truly interactive views is the "Info Panel". This allows you to define the text and buttons that appear on the right side of a view when it first loads. Use the info panel to explain to a user exactly what you'd like them to do and which buttons they should click:


You can also include in the info panel hyperlinks to other Studio / City views, effectively creating an online multi-page application without any coding. This is what we mean when we talk about developing "data applications" instead of just data visualizations.


Once you understand how to add these calls to action to your views, you can create powerful interfaces to support individual workflows or use them to crowdsource data and then facilitate conversations based on the connections between the information submitted. Click on those concepts to learn more.