Towards a Quality Approach to Hierarchical Color Maps

TL;DR

This paper explores how to design effective hierarchical color maps by analyzing design decisions and proposing quality criteria, aiming to improve data structure perception.

Contribution

It adapts existing color map design rules to hierarchical maps and offers recommendations and foundational quality criteria for their evaluation.

Findings

Design decisions significantly impact hierarchical map perception

Recommendations improve clarity for analysis scenarios

Foundation for objective quality assessment of hierarchical color maps

Abstract

To improve the perception of hierarchical structures in data sets, several color map generation algorithms have been proposed to take this structure into account. But the design of hierarchical color maps elicits different requirements to those of color maps for tabular data. Within this paper, we make an initial effort to put design rules from the color map literature into the context of hierarchical color maps. We investigate the impact of several design decisions and provide recommendations for various analysis scenarios. Thus, we lay the foundation for objective quality criteria to evaluate hierarchical color maps.