 Viégas began her research while at the MIT Media Lab, focusing on graphical interfaces for online communication.Her Chat Circles system introduced ideas such as proximity-based filtering of conversation and a visual archive of chat history displaying the overall rhythm and form of a conversation.Her email visualization designs (including PostHistory and Themail) are the foundation for many other systems; her findings on how visualizations are often used for storytelling influenced subsequent work on the collaborative aspects of visualization.