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October 12, 2015

Makeover Monday: State of Connectivity 2014

3 comments
I didn’t have much time today for a makeover, so this will be a bit brief. I had tagged this article from the Facebook internet.org team as needing a makeover. It’s the cover of the report that caught my attention.


I guess what bothers me most is that this simple bar chart is completely unreadable. I can’t find any countries unless I use a microscope. I assume this was by design, but I don’t see the value in it.

Of course the data was not provided, so I did a quick Google search and found the data in Wikipedia. I then used the InterWorks Web Data Connector for import.io to extract the data. I blended that with another data set I had of country abbreviations.

I started by recreating the original in Tableau.



Ok, I still can’t read it, but I can hover over a bar at least. I wanted something better, something easier to understand, something people might want to quickly explore. I created this three chart layout which includes a map, bar chart (same as the original, but larger), and a slope graph.

I’m not totally sold that this is complete or great, but it’s definitely better than the original. And remember, I timebox myself on these makeovers, so once I reach my time limit I stop. Rules are rules.


3 comments :

  1. Do you think that a better representation of the map would involve selecting a region instead of showing the whole map, so that the finer details (like the smaller countries) aren't totally lost as noise points. While you would have to assign a region to all of the countries involved, it would add the ability to look at connectivity by region and compare at that level.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That functionality is already included. Simply hover over the map and you'll see a search icon. Enter a region in there.

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    2. Ah, it's a click and not a hover, but nice! Never mind then....

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