Display hierarchical structure and corresponding reference data

Do any of you have any suggestion on how to design view for reference data and make it easy to navigate and understand. We are developing a web application and have this hierarchical setup:

  • 1 corporation that can have X numbers of large teams below
  • Each large team can have X number of small teams below
  • A small team can belong to several larger teams (Z belongs to both A and B in the image below)
  • Each level in this hierarchy can have X numbers of accounts and GUI-users

enter image description here

We need to have a view (or perhaps views) where it’s possible to find all entities and view a details “page” with more information for each entity.

It should be possible to

  • query and find all larger and/or smaller teams
  • find all accounts a specific team owns
  • a user from a smaller team should be able to find all larger teams he belongs to
  • Given an account, find the smaller team that owns it and what larger teams it belongs to

We are considering a combinations of list structures, where the first one more or less acts as a tree structure and displays the hierarchal team structure. enter image description here

When selecting a team all users below that team are displayed as well as the details for the specific team. If/when selecting a user the details to the right is replaced with the user details. For a team you can in the details view see all teams that it belongs to/are below. The downside with this solution is that a smaller team will be duplicated in the tree structure under all larger teams it belongs to.

Questions:

  • Anyone that has tried a similar solution?
  • Is it obvious that the users are only the ones that are on the specific node/entity you are viewing, so if you have selected Corporation you get only the users for that level, NOT all users (e.g all users below)?
    • Where/how should the accounts be displayed?

If anyone has a better solution I'm up for anything :)

Tags: