Re: Visual representations of complex relationships

Mark,

You might get some interesting and useful comments from posting this in the comp.human-factors group.

JMG Mark McMillan wrote:

> Greetings.
>
> We are struggling with how to build a user interface for data which
> has some complex relationships. In particular, the data has a number
> of N:N relationships between business objects (tables). This is an
> insurance application where you have the basic concepts of CLIENTS
> (people or organizations), POLICIES (the insurance product), and
> ROLES (the role that a CLIENT plays in a particular policy).
>
> There are a number of roles that a client can play in a policy
> (e.g. they can be an INSURED, DRIVER, LIEN_HOLDER, etc). A policy
> can have any number of clients related to it via different roles, and
> likewise, a particular client can be related to any number of policies.
>
> In effect, the 'roles' express N:N relationships between CLIENTS and
> POLICIES.
>
> From a programming point of view all this is fine and works well.
> But we need to build a UI that expresses these relationships, allows
> the user to quickly find the information they want, and is easy to
> use for a relative novice.
>
> The traditional approach is to use two (visual) tables, the first
> contains (say) a list of CLIENTS. When a client is selected, the
> 2nd table is populated with all the POLICIES to which the selected
> client is related. This is a clumsy UI (there is no clear *visual*
> relationship between the tables). It is also client-centric... what
> if the user wants to select from the list of all POLICIES first?
>
> Our partial solution is to use a tree-view where the root nodes are
> clients, and they expand to show all the policies to which the
> client is related. This is OK, but is still client-centric. So we
> added a "mode" button that turns the model around and puts the
> policies at the root and they expand to show the related clients.
> This is a bit confusing... and it all gets much worse when we want
> to add some "folder"-style organization to the whole thing.
>
> I feel like we are missing some clever, simple way to visualize these
> N:N relationships and allow a user to explore them from either end.
>
> Anyone have ideas on good UI techniques for this sort of thing?
>
> Thanks,
> -Mark McMillan
Received on Wed Jan 12 2000 - 00:00:00 CET