After you have a model, and some starting data in your model, it's time to create your first visualization.  You can do this by hovering over any element type and clicking the "Visualize" icon:

Or you can click on the "Views" menu option in the left sidebar and create a new view. Either way will require you to specify the data you want to visualize:

When creating your first view, we suggest keeping it simple and just adding a query for each element type you want to show up in the visualization.

Once you click the "Visualize" button, you'll see all the elements appear for the element types specified, and any connections that exist between them. The system will pick some default colors for the different element types, show labels on the different connection types, and represent all elements as circles:

The view above is what this Getting Started view looked like before any custom styling was added! Applying styles can really transform your view, allowing you to change every visual aspect of the network diagram. Click on the cog icon in the upper left of the view and select "Styles":

Clicking on an element type will open a style box. Click the + button to add style rules. If you want to have a style be dynamically driven based on a field of the element (like setting the icon based on an image provided for each element), click the vertical dots next to the style and change the rule from being "fixed" to being a "lookup". Then select the field you want to use as the lookup value.

If you have a lot of connections in your network it can quickly become busy and overwhelming. A quick way to address this is to style the connections so that they are less prominent. Try setting a style on all connections that lowers the opacity of the connection to 0.2 and sets the text size to 0 so that the labels don't appear:

A particularly powerful feature is the ability to style just a subset of elements or connections based on certain criteria using "Custom Rules". When you create a new custom rule, you can give it a name, and click on the + button that appears next to the element type or click on the connection type to specify your criteria. In the example below we've applied a style of orange diamonds to just the higher-level concepts that have sub-concepts below them:

The network diagram uses a force-directed layout to adjust the position of the elements on the screen. You can use styles to control all the aspects of the physics responsible for the motion. You can also turn the physics off entirely and manually position the nodes by dragging them around, or drive their positions based on the data using a custom rule. There are many global view settings available by clicking on the settings button in the lower right corner. If you check the box to "Persist node positions" the layout will be saved when you save the view.

Since you are an admin of your Studio or City, you have many controls available to you that a non-admin does not. If you want to see what the view will look like for a non-admin user, toggle the slider in the upper right corner from "edit" to "view" mode:

Keep in mind that a non-admin user won't have the left sidebar either. You can give non-admin users of your view more capabilities by clicking on the cog icon and using the "Controls" settings to expose more features. This allows you to create everything from simple read-only views to advanced data-entry data applications.

Try this: create a view with a conditional style rule based on some aspect of the data contained within an element (for example, set the color to red if the priority field is high or to green if it's low) and then expose the edit button so that changes to that field of the element results in the style changing.

Once you've created a view, you can invite people into your Studio or City to check it out, or you can make the view public so that others can interact with it without having to log in:

Public views can also be embedded in your own website.

The biggest differentiator between Exaptive views and other network visualization tools is the support that Exaptive views have for data-entry. Click on the "Calls to Action" concept to see more about this.