Identifying Best Practices for Visualizing Photo Statistics and Galleries using Treemaps
John A. Guerra‐Gomez, Cati Boulanger, Sanjay Kairam, David A. Shamma · 2016
Online photo collections are often presented along with numeric data, such as views, likes, or comments. Treemaps are ideal for visualizing such collections, as they present numeric values using rectangular blocks, within which photos can be presented. Despite abundant research showing that photo treemaps and similar space-filling approaches are useful and appealing for users, understanding of the ideal parameters for constructing these representations remains limited. To address this, we contribute a series of experiments targeted at identifying design parameters for building photo treemaps. Our first study explores the number of photos presented at each level in the treemap, finding that using fewer photos makes visualizations more searchable and preferable to users. A second study examines the tradeoff between sizing photos according to the numeric values and presenting them in a more familiar layout with fixed aspect ratios. These results inform a third study, in which a prototype was used to probe the preferences of active Flickr users for using treemaps for navigating photo collections.