# Interactive Visualisation of Hierarchical Quantitative Data: An Evaluation

## TL;DR

This study evaluates and compares the effectiveness of treemaps, icicle plots, sunburst charts, and a new sundown chart for visualizing hierarchical quantitative data, revealing user preferences and performance differences.

## Contribution

It introduces and assesses a semicircular sundown chart, providing insights into visualization effectiveness and user preferences for hierarchical data.

## Key findings

- Treemaps were least preferred and slowest in navigation.
- Icicle plots and sundown charts had similar performance.
- Users slightly preferred icicle plots over sundown charts.

## Abstract

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.