Rectangle orientation in area judgment task for treemap design

Prior works on treemaps have mainly focused on developing the new layouts. The existing treemaps generated from various algorithms require careful examination on design parameter. However, current research does not provide usability studies of treemap guidelines on effectiveness of design parameters. Hence, selecting the most effective parameter for certain type of task is primarily based on intuition preference of visualization designer. For example, in the existing research, there is insufficient guidance on orientation for treemap design yet. Therefore, the impact of orientation remains unclear in visual analysis tasks performance. The contribution of this paper is to assess the effect of orientation in visual data analysis process so that we will further investigate treemap design guidance