Interactive Visualisation of Hierarchical Quantitative Data: An Evaluation
This work addresses visualization selection for users analyzing hierarchical data, but it is incremental as it evaluates existing methods with a new variant.
The study compared visualizations for hierarchical quantitative data, finding that treemaps were least preferred and performed worse in navigation and hierarchy understanding tasks, while icicle plots and sundown charts had similar performance with a slight preference for icicle plots.
We have compared three common visualisations for hierarchical quantitative data, treemaps, icicle plots and sunburst charts as well as a semicircular variant of sunburst charts we call the sundown chart. In a pilot study, we found that the sunburst chart was least preferred. In a controlled study with 12 participants, we compared treemaps, icicle plots and sundown charts. Treemap was the least preferred and had a slower performance on a basic navigation task and slower performance and accuracy in hierarchy understanding tasks. The icicle plot and sundown chart had similar performance with slight user preference for the icicle plot.