A Study on the Effectiveness of Tree-Maps as Tree Visualization Techniques

Tree Structure visualization techniques are one of the important techniques to support the analysis of large hierarchical structure data. They are typically used as tree structure node-link diagram. However, it is difficult to visualize the content of directories when there are too many child nodes. In this paper, a study on the effectiveness of the tree-maps as tree structure visualization will be presented. Tree-maps are always considered as one of the interesting topic of research in HCI. Therefore, in this paper we will discuss about applying various types of Tree-maps as one of the visualization techniques. First, we will look into current problem faced by Tree structured node-link diagram. We will also look into four main types of tree-maps such as original tree-maps, Circular Tree-maps, Cushion Tree-maps and 3D Tree-maps. Finally, the effectiveness of these tree-maps to visualize the hierarchy of the directory will be investigated by conducting a simple user experiments.