CSE498, Collaborative Design, Fall 2011
Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State University

Urban Science is an automotive consulting company, helping manufacturers better evaluate, structure, and manage their dealer networks and marketing programs through a combination of scientific analysis and software solutions.

In order to manage marketing and research data efficiently, Urban Science utilizes multiple hierarchical organization systems. This data is currently presented in a traditional text based manner. The goal of Visual Hierarchy Selection is to allow users to navigate through this same data in a more intuitive, modern, and visual fashion.

Visual Hierarchy Selection provides a natural user experience across keyboard, mouse, and touch-based interfaces. A search feature is implemented to allow for quicker selection, both through the entire hierarchy and on each level during navigation. Due to the variety of data managed, Visual Hierarchy Selection implements multiple display styles, allowing data to be visually represented in an appropriate manner for the content.

The hierarchical data is retrieved before it is requested by the user and stored, so that Visual Hierarchy Selection provides not only a visually appealing interface but one that is responsive and easy to use.

Visual Hierarchy Selection is built to run in any modern browser, using Javascript and HTML. The data is stored in a SQL database on a server running Microsoft SQL Server 2008, and retrieved using ASP.NET.