Member-only story

Using treemaps to understand hierarchical data

How to make sense of a complex visualization technique.

Kai Wong
UX Collective

--

Several people walking in the dark while a several hanging lights are illuminating the rest of the room
Photo by Robynne Hu on Unsplash

I didn’t understand the point of treemaps until I worked with a large structured dataset.

As part of an extensive user research effort, we collected open-ended survey data from 130 participants. After standardizing the data and doing thematic analysis, the next topic was to try and figure out a way to visualize it.

After analyzing the data, it was a dataset with over 20 themes and several different categories of respondents. This was a much larger dataset than I was used to visualizing: what was I supposed to do?

That’s when I first started to learn about treemaps. To understand why let’s first examine why they were first created: what’s taking up all my hard drive space?

Understanding hierarchical data

In 1990, Ben Shneiderman, Human-Computer Interaction and Information Visualization pioneer, had an issue: his hard drive was full of files, but he didn’t know what was taking up so much space.

Rather than sort through several directories, he instead devised a method for visualizing the hierarchy of files by a technique called treemapping: this technique fills all available space with a hierarchy of…

--

--

No responses yet

What are your thoughts?