All my private media assets are stored on my Mac hard-disk labelled "Media". My iTunes collection with aprox. 1300 songs (turquoise block), around 22,000 photos (auburn block) and a few large HD video files (blue) are all stored there. Recently, when the drive was almost full, I read about the free "Disk Inventory" software in a Mac magazine. The software, it was promised, provides an overview of the space being wasted on the hard disk. What a surprise! The blue 16Gb monsters (1080p-Apple ProRes 444 files) were the cause of my lack of storage space. Disk Inventory works with the Treemap algorithm, which displays a systematic chart consisting of rectangles. In this application, every file is displayed as a rectangle, proportional in size and arranged according to directory.
After a long wait, Michael Fieg was the first to suggest Treemaps in PIM. Our product management team subsequently experimented with the UI paradigm. Using the Heiler Product Manager (HPM 1.5), we defined and created in just a few minutes a Treemap export that contains the sales and quality information for more than a thousand products. The individual boxes were generated according to the category of goods. Turnover determined the optical field size, and the quality status determined the color of the item. This produced the following image:
Using this cockpit with an HPM view, the user was able to directly identify and select the appropriate items that record high turnover and yet have poor data quality. Furthermore, the category manager can see with just a quick glance that the goods category 'batteries' is not in such good shape. For instance, the items have no correlating image and there is no indication of their classification. If the cursor is held over a field, further data regarding the quality or quantitative information of that particular item is displayed. With a click, the user can now select the appropriate goods category and open a selection of items in order to carry out a data management workflow.
Where do we go from here?
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