What's the best way to illustrate calls and responses on a timeline?

Question

Problem:

I have a platform that sends and receives notifications from mobile users. Here's how the process works.

1. Platform user pokes a mobile user.
2. Sometime later the mobile user will respond with a boolean response (good or bad) back to the platform.

The platform user can send many pokes a day or at a time, and the mobile users can respond from within a couple seconds to a few hours. I'd like to give the platform user an at-a-glance overview of the poke/response activity over time. I'm also privy to using a graphic, because my entire platform site is slowly turning into just a collection of pages with different tables + detail cards.

Current Solution

Here's what I have right now. You can see that the selected event is taller on the timeline graph to show emphasis:

There are many issues with this. It's not engaging, height is only used to distinct pokes from responses, and quick user responses are just stacked on top of each other.

Any ideas on how to convey this information?

Answer 1

Look for all the ways your data can be presented and consider facts as : how many users will you poke the most and the least. Can I poke 500 users or 50000 users ? What is important for me to see ? Who I poked or who responded or what the response is ?

That will lead you to a more condensed view. Maybe a chart with filters and hover to show info. It depends on what is important for the user to see.

Answer 2

I needed something similar and I've ended using Google chart timeline, as you can stack events that start and end at different times but overlapping and you see clearly the duration.