I was reading the article Marketing Analytics Is Broken. Salesforce Is Fixing It With AI (And IoT) on Forbes and I was wondering if anyone could tell me if there was a name for the type of chart they are using on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud dashboard. It is the one the blue lines and its intersections look a bit like highway on and off ramps?
It's an user flow diagram, although in UML is known as an interaction diagram. If you see the caption, they name it as interaction diagram.
Nevertheless, I think the kind of data visualization that it provides is closer to an archetypic user flow rather than an interaction diagram, which is more related to the process and architecture on your own side rather than others (this can be discussed ad infinitum, because you can say Facebook is an actor in this model and you would be right, but to make things simpler)
This diagram looks like a hybrid between a Sankey diagram and a user flow/interaction diagram (but for an omnichannel flow/process) but modified with a few fancy elements that seems to represent some things that I don't really know too much about. It seems to also indicate where users drop out so that's similar to a user funnel analysis that you do for sales/marketing conversion.
However, the intent of the diagram is clear (enough). It is trying to show the flow of how a user goes from being aware of a product to adopting it (as indicated by the stepped progress bar at the top, and the interaction that happens between the different channels (the matrix in the middle).
You could try to label it as a mashup of a few different types of diagrams, but it is probably easier to just say that it is a customized (interactive?) visualization of the user adoption funnel across multiple channels (which is still a mouthful :p).
