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Björn Engdahl Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Malin Köksal Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Gary Marsden University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems archive
CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems table of contents
Portland, OR, USA SESSION: Late breaking results: short papers table of contents
Pages: 1355 - 1358
Year of Publication: 2005
ISBN:1-59593-002-7

Abstract:
This paper describes a new way of visualizing threaded discussion forums on compact displays. The technique uses squarified treemaps to render the threads in discussion forums as colored rectangles, thereby using 100% of the limited screen space. We conducted a preliminary user study, which compared the treemap version and a traditional text based tree interface. This showed that the contents of the discussion forum were easily grasped when using a treemap, even though there were in excess of one hundred threads. In particular our technique showed a significant improvement in time for finding the largest and most active threads. Overall, it was shown that the benefits derived from using treemaps on desktop computers are still valid for small screens.

My Discussion:
Short and sweet results paper describing an experiment with a visualization technique. It highlights that, even with a test-population 6 computer-savvy users, a little user-testing can quickly bring a UI designer's feet back firmly on the ground with regards to something like color coding (the user's did not immediatly understand the coding, much in line with earlier but often neglected experimental results). The visualization technique used, treemaps, can be useful for more than just forums, so papers like this can serve as creative stimulation when having to tackle design problems.