Hierarchy Format#500

Just a feedback on the latest formatting of the hierarchy – the bigger circles are overlapping especially on HCG nests where our nests are sort of broad. I liked the old format better where you can distinguish each circle from each other and the lines & circles do not overlap.

Thank you!

Thanks for the feedback! I hear/see you, the long chain of undifferentiated tags is hard to read.

First, to give some justification for why we made this change- our hierarchy may contain:

• Standard tags
• Data Elements
• Interventions
• Question tags
• Hidden tags

Each of these tag types needed different representations, so we increased the size & styling of tags to make it work.

We’ll brainstorm ideas for improving overlap, but would ears to recommendations as well! Decreasing size a bit might be possible, but I’m not sure it would be a solution in all cases (really big hierarchies).

thanks a lot!

A small, but hopefully impactful, update on this: our next release will add a whitering around each non-question tag. To our eyes, this improves ability to distinguish tags, but I’d like to hear other opinions!

(ignore the silly tag names, this is a nest I use in development :))

I see the idea about the white rings but I think there would still be too much overlap to read clearly. This example has tags that become hidden, top right tags overlap so much you can’t see them unless you hover your cursor over it directly.

Consensus - we have to Control Z this update :)

All we recently changed was:

• the size of tags (“nodes”), to have a larger radius
• The styling of the labels, to have a white background and a border

As listed above, we did this to allow representation of a large number of possible states tags can take on. Smaller nodes in the visual prevented us from effectively being able to represent all those states.

To your example - I do think white rings clarify the overlap between nodes. The outstanding issue (which has always existed) is that node labels overlap. Agreed, it’s not pretty! But:

• Rolling back our update will not fix label overlap
• Meaning, we can:
  • Totally forgo labels of root tags
  • More selectively display root labels, so that only some have labels without hover, to avoid overlap

@Katiekummer @Erin Sheffels

Oh, one more option- selective display (zoom?) of the hierarchy. If you’re only looking at one root at a time, there’s less information on display –> less overlap.

Open to your thoughts on these options, or alternatives I might be missing!

Agree that the thicker circles in tags make the hierarchies harder to read/navigate, though I think the white circles help. Maybe only root tags with children tags could be labeled by default, and the others have the scroll over label? Thanks Karl!