Facilitating visual queries in the TreeMap using distortion techniques

Abstract

TreeMap is one a common space-filling visualization technique to display large hierarchies in a limited display space. In TreeMaps, highlighting techniques are widely used to depict search results from visual queries. To improve visualizing the queries results in the TreeMap, we designed a continuous animated multi-distortion algorithm based on fisheye and continuous zooming techniques. To evaluate the effectiveness of the new algorithm, we conducted an experiment to compare the distortion technique to the traditional highlighting methods used in TreeMaps. The results suggest that the multi-distortion technique is only effective with small result sets but not as effective as simple highlighting for large search result sets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.