Now that I’ve got treemaps on the brain, I keep noticing how many things could be better understood using this visualization technique. A few examples:

We thought it would be a nice demonstration to use data from the 1997 and 2002 US Economic Census (unfortunately 2007 isn't out yet) to see what kind of stories bubble forth. The demonstration was built using a component from JuiceKit™, our recently open sourced Software Development Kit (SDK) for building Information Experience™ applications. The SDK can be used by web designers and developers to build graphically rich and interactive information displays. JuiceKit currently integrates with Adobe Flex to create components that are easy to implement and aesthetically pleasing.

Check out the treemap here.

Here are a few of the macro-trends that I found:

• The rise of CostCo, Amazon, and Home Depot: This time period saw strong growth in warehouse clubs and superstores, online retailers (“electronic shopping”), and home centers.
• From manufacturing to services economy: Most of the growth was in service sectors (financial services, healthcare, professional services) while manufacturing was shrinking.
• Productivity gains, even in adversity: For struggling sectors, the employee declines almost always outpaced the sales declines — squeezing more sales per employee.
• Demographic shifts: Homes and services for the elderly were among the strongest areas of growth in the category of “healthcare and social assistance.”

And there were lots of little insights as well:

• No wonder hospital TV shows are so popular: Hospitals are the largest single employer as a business-type.
• Starbucks and Krispy Kreme steal the unhealthy food dollar: Cookies and frozen yogurt retail saw a rapid decline while coffee and donut shops flourished.
• Goodbye stand-alone pump: Gas stations with convenience stores overtook the just-plain gas station.
• It can’t last, can it?: Mortgage broker payroll up 177%.

Once you understand how to read treemaps, they are great for exploring data like this: hierarchical with both quantity and quality-type measures. In a true testament to their power, my wife admitted this visualization was “kinda interesting.”

Recently we wanted to show how Concentrate, our new long-tail search analytics tool, could give you a view of search patterns across travel websites. As political junkies, we were inspired by this chart from our friends at the NY Times.

The first tool we tried, simply on principle, was Excel 2003. As expected, making a NY Times quality bubble chart in Excel 2003 is a hard problem. Here's a draft of how far I got before giving in to label fatigue.

The bubbles themselves aren't tough, but getting the labels right is hard. I'd love to see a solution, so if any reader wants to tackle it eternal fame can be yours. Here is a CSV if you want to try.

travelpatterns.csv

Another of the tools we use at Juice is NodeBox, which we used to make this:

Here's the code that made the graph.

The power of a programmatic approach like this is that by changing a line or two, you can get the following. Click for a larger version. Click the text for the code..

Vary formatting by value

Drop the labels, tighten the spacing

Display the largest item in each row as a red square

With great power comes a great need to exercise restraint. Otherwise you end up like these poor chaps. Must... flex... restraint... muscles...