QuickSight Visuals - Tree Maps

Hello, I'm Dylan, a cloud developer at Westloop Strategy, an AWS Partner. As part of our learning series for QuickSight dashboard visuals, we're going to discuss the features and functionalities available with Tree Maps.

Tree Map visuals can be a very insightful tool if we know how to build them properly and the scenarios they are used for. If we are running a company with multiple clients, sometimes comparing metrics between each of them is not the most useful tool.

These clients may vary in size, whether that be by their income or by the number of employees they staff. Oftentimes, it will be helpful to include these variations when attempting to compare client data to ensure performance measurements are similar and helpful information can be gained.

To represent this, let's create a Tree Map that will contain some drill-down options. I'm going to add industry and customer to my group by field well, profit to size, and number of products sold to color.

Now you can see that industries with the most profit are the largest boxes and the number of products sold determine how dark the box displays. Where this becomes really interesting is now you can see directly how retail and tech compare since they are two industries with a similar amount of profit.

Yet even though tech is slightly lower in value, over a thousand more products have actually been sold. This could then lead us towards two conclusions. Either their overhead per product sold is significantly higher than retail, or the individual product sold is on average worth less. This visual is not being utilized to give us the exact reason for each of these differences, but what it does do is give us an understanding of which industries are best used for comparison metrics to better determine the health and well -being of an individual company compared to others of a similar size.

Now since we implemented a drill down for this visual we can get an even closer look at how our individual customers are comparing. On the visual select the down arrow labeled as drill down from industry and we're going to start seeing a lot more variation.

If we remember though, our finance and manufacturing industries were similar in profit. So I'm going to add a filter on this visual to see customers in those industries. Also, to make this even more insightful for our readers, I'm gonna add a tooltip for the industry field so we can compare customers between these two industries more easily. Click our format visual icon, make detailed tool tip is selected, then click the add field button. We will search for our industry field and select unique value in our displayed value drop down and click save.

Now when a reader for this visual gets to this point, they have this industry tag showing for each customer and can start finding more information about the performance of the individual customer and build out proposals to improve their profits to align with customers of a similar size and industry.

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