[fgblanch]

I think the only proven use cases for ZUIs have been Maps, Calendars, and Photo apps (Apple Photos and Google Photos). The last two to switch between different time period views: Day->Month->Year for photos and Day>Week>Month for calendars.

[solardev]

There is maybe some room for design too (Figma), but there are many times I wish it DIDN'T do that and encouraged better frame/file organization instead.

Similarly, it's too often used for (mis)organization, like in Miro or Prezi or "mind map" apps. I feel like those try to shoehorn information into Sherlock-like "mind palaces" in a way that only makes sense for the creator but are inscrutable to everyone else and just makes information harder to find later on. They always lead to some sort of pixel-hunting where the presenter zooms out and in, out and in, out and in, wasting time on navigation and placefinding instead of information dissemination.

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On the other hand, it CAN be useful for some visualizations, like taxonomy: https://itol.embl.de/itol.cgi or https://www.onezoom.org/life.html

"Drill down for details" like in disk space analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKClylmlv3w&t=1s (or similar one in D3: https://observablehq.com/@d3/zoomable-sunburst)

Treemaps: https://observablehq.com/@d3/zoomable-treemap

I think the overall point is some types of hierarchical information naturally lend themselves to "drill down" type UIs more than others. When you have levels of detail you don't need to see at first glance, drilling/zooming is awesome. When you have a bunch of things of equal hierarchy, presenting them in a big flat pile isn't any better in the virtual world than in the real world... it's the digital equivalent of 10,000 sticky notes on a wall.

[DonHopkins]

Tree-Maps: A Space-Filling Approach to the Visualization of Hierarchical Information Structures:

https://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Johnson1991Tree.pdf

HCIL Archive: Treemap Home Page:

https://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/hcil/treemap/

How Ben Shneiderman’s Treemaps Found Place In The Museum Of Modern Art:

https://analyticsindiamag.com/how-ben-shneidermans-treemaps-...

>Ben Shneiderman was inspired by the 1960's 'Op Art' and the exhibits that he came across at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Op Art or Optical art is a form of kinetic art related to geometric designs that create movement in the eyes.

Ben Shneiderman's Treemap Art:

https://treemapart.wordpress.com/

>This site features draft designs and full views of the Treemap Art project. View more about the exhibitions.

>By Ben Shneiderman

>Although I conceived treemaps for purely functional purposes (understanding the allocation of space on a hard drive), I was always aware that there were appealing aesthetic aspects to treemaps. Maybe my experiences with OP-ART movements of the 60s & 70s gave me the idea that a treemap might become a work of art. That idea was revived in 2013 by way of my contacts with Manuel Lima who produced a beautiful coffee-table book on the history of trees that has several chapters on treemaps and their variations.

>I believe that there are at least four aesthetic aspects of treemaps:

>1. layout design (slice-and-dice, squarified, ordered, strip, etc.), >2. color palette (muted, bold, sequential, divergent, rainbow, etc.), and, >3. aspect ratio of the entire image (square, golden ratio, wide, tall, etc.). >4. prominence of borders for each region, each hierarchy level, and the surrounding box

Ben Shneiderman: Every AlgoRiThm has ART in it: Treemap Art Project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LW4m6BdQXI

>Ben Shneiderman, distinguished university professor, University of Maryland, College Park and National Academy of Engineering member, spoke at the October 16, 2014 DC Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER). Ben Shneiderman described the invention of treemaps and showed examples of its usage. He then turned to the aesthetics of treemaps, which led him to create the “Every AlgoRiThm has ART in it: Treemap Art Project” exhibit on view in the Keck Center first floor galleries (www.cpnas.org). He demonstrated how users of the free treemap application can generate their own artworks, without programming.

The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — Don Hopkins — October 1989 (a paper I wrote when I worked with Ben Shneiderman at his University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...

>The Pseudo Scientific Visualizer

>Darkness fell in from every side, a sphere of singing black, pressure on the extended crystal nerves of the universe of data he had nearly become… And when he was nothing, compressed at the heart of all that dark, there came a point where the dark could be no more, and something tore. The Kuang program spurted from tarnished cloud, Case’s consciousness divided like beads of mercury, arcing above an endless beach the color of the dark silver clouds. His vision was spherical, as though a single retina lined the inner surface of a globe that contained all things, if all things could be counted.

>[Gibson, Neuromancer]

>The Pseudo Scientific Visualizer is the object browser for the other half of your brain, a fish-eye lens for the macroscopic examination of data. It can display arbitrarily large, arbitrarily deep structures, in a fixed amount of space. It shows form, texture, density, depth, fan out, and complexity.

[solardev]

Sounds like we need a treemap of treemaps!