The projects research focused on exploring techniques for visualizing and interacting with hierarchical data. It evaluated what are the most common practices for the exploration of hierarchical data and how it can further be designed using brushing and linking. The project was carried out at the Scientific Visualization unit at Linköping University. The work conducted a literature study and an evaluation using user tests. The evaluation is a pilot study where the visualizations, brushing techniques, dataset size, and conduction of the user test are based on a literature study. The study identified node-link diagrams, treemaps, and icicle plots as the most commonly used generic visualization techniques for exploring hierarchical data in research. Along with those visualizations, three brushing approaches linking different nodes to each other (based on different kinds of kinship) were applied in several combinations in prototypes, shown and used in the user tests. The results showed that coordinated multiple views with brushing and linking were frequently employed, allowing users to manipulate and interact with data on one screen while seeing relevant views updated. The study showed that treemaps are often struggling to visualize beyond leaf nodes and node-link diagrams become cluttered. The user study indicated that D-brushing (data brushed in descending directions) was preferred, and certain brushing methods were suitable depending on the task. Since the research is a pilot study, it is recommended to perform additional studies such as further designing brushing to provide a guideline for user freedom in highlighting relationships, and in linked views. Some design suggestions that are worth studying and testing in further work are, for example, using color maps to show the hierarchical attributes and relationships between nodes while brushing, re-layouts of text labels, and ordering nodes alphabetically