Categories tree structure UI with brands and setting value with inheritance

Question

We have a tree of categories as a first column and commission as a second column. Commission has inheritance abilities, e.g. if I set commission on Category 1 by default it will be applied to Category 2 as well.

We can set commission also to brands for different categories. The simplest example would be:

Currently, it duplicates the category row, but with a brand label.

If we set the brand commission on the parent category it should be inherited by the subcategories. In the current UI it will duplicate a subtree:

How to improve display for better user experience and readability? How can I display it without duplication of subtrees of categories? Or duplication can be present, but UI should be more usable

Answer 1

Switching the order of the columns would improve readability. This would avoid the Commission column being pushed farther and farther to the right each time a new level is added to the tree.

The visual depiction of a commission can show if it is inherited from a parent level or not. Just to demonstrate, in the image, inherited commissions (cat 2,3,7) have had their opacity reduced while non-inherited commissions have an opacity of 100%.

Inherited brands can follow suit and also appear faded out it. This allows both brands and categories to be displayed simultaneously. This maintains an understandable hierarchy while showing brands applied to different levels of the tree. It also improves readability by aligning the brands in a column rather than duplicating the tree.

The visual depiction of a commission can also show if it is assigned to a category or to a brand+category. This can be achieved by the commission visually matching either the style of the category or the style of the brand (since “brand+commission” has priority over “category”).

Answer 2

As I view it the brands (orange) seem to be a different hierarchy then the subcategories (blue). If you don't want to display both of them (duplication), you will have to switch them.

Answer 3

Construct a table consisting of columns representing each type of object class.

In your case, one column would consist of the objects of category 1 and category 4 and their siblings. Another column would be of category 2, 3, and 5 and their siblings. A third would be those for category 6 and 7 etc.

Presumably there would be another column for brands.

The usual way of building a tree would work from a hierarchy of parent - child - grandchild. Quite often you can identify the hierarchy by the repetition of data. For example if you have 10 rows in your table and the brand columns has 2 different values but another column has 10 different values and a third column has 6 different values you could be in a position to say the the 2 value column is the parent, the 6 value colunn is the child and the 10 value column is the grandchild.

You can build trees in different ways depending on the hierarchy you want to have. You are proposing to have brand as a child attribute of categories. This might be appropriate or not.

It is possible that your users have opinions on how this tree should be organized. Ask them.

Answer 4

Take brand label as a kind of subcategory.

In such case your latest structure could look like as follows:

UPDATE:

In this way you'll be able to make brand label root category which allow you to set brand's commission for all categories.