Graphical Tables - An Alternative to Treemaps

Sean blogged the other day about using a treemap to visualize the drivers of the Australian Inflation. He got inspired to create a treemap by an NYT article that used an interactive version of the following treemap:

This chart looks nice on the first view. It makes nice use of muted colors, the shapes look well balanced and certainly the graphic designer did a good job. However, from a data visualization perspective this chart has a couple of flaws.

Ben Shneiderman designed Treemaps to visualize deep directory tree structures.

Ben explained treemaps in an article as:

“Among the growing family of visual analytic tools, treemap are flourishing in organizations that require daily monitoring of complex activities with thousands of products, projects, or salespeople. Tabular reports, bar charts, line graphs, and scattergrams are important tools, but for complex activities where there are numerous sales regions, manufacturing plants, or product lines the hierarchical structures provided by treemaps can be helpful. While tabular displays and spreadsheets can show 30-60 rows at a time on typical displays, the colorful presentations in treemaps can accommodate hundreds or thousands of items in a meaningfully organized display that allows patterns and exceptions to be spotted in seconds.[…] Treemaps are a space-filling approach to showing hierarchies in which the rectangular screen space is divided into regions, and then each region is divided again for each level in the hierarchy.”

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