November 16, 2015
Makeover Monday: What Country Has the Most Unsustainable Debt?
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howmuch.net
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Makeover Monday
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2 comments
Consider a scale of 1-10: 1 is a great viz, 10 is terrible. The visualisation I’m choosing to makeover this week is about a 15. It’s THAT bad. Here goes:
Let’s take a look at what they’ve done poorly:
Given the above challenges, I’ve used Tableau story points to walk you through the makeover. In the story, I take you through a series of visualisations that gradually improve the original.
Let’s take a look at what they’ve done poorly:
- Splitting the countries apart makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. That totally ruins the reason for using a map in the first place.
To Do: Put the map back together and let the map serve its purpose. - Each country is sized by a combination of its GDP and debt, but I only realized that in the super tiny note at the bottom left.
To Do: Make the sizing more obvious and easier to understand. - The author used a stop light colour scheme. This would be terrible to read for a colour-blind person.
To Do: Change the colour scale to something more effective that appeals to everyone. - The colour scale is not even. There’s only one colour on the negative side and three on the positive side.
To Do: Make the ranges equivalent. - Not every country is included, so is a map even the right choice in the first place?
To Do: Consider alternative charts, e.g., bars. - There’s no need to label every country and the metric labels are overly precise. Does it make much difference if Germany is 74.70% or 75%?
To Do: Clean up the clutter.
Given the above challenges, I’ve used Tableau story points to walk you through the makeover. In the story, I take you through a series of visualisations that gradually improve the original.
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I love the scatterplot, but I have some thoughts around further enhancing this makeover (see Viz below). My concerns:
ReplyDelete* Loss of labels makes the Viz harder to use, because you have to either hover or select a country. I added labels, so you easily identify the outliers.
* Using position _and_ color to indicate quadrant is redundant. I used color to bring geography back, so you can look at interesting clusters like Europe.
* I labelled the quadrants so you don't have to refer to a color legend to understand the 4 quadrants.
* I toned down the grid lines for legibility.
https://public.tableau.com/views/DebttoGDP_1/Makeover?:embed=y&:display_count=yes&:showTabs=y
Good stuff as always,
-Steve
Great additions Steve! I really like what you've done. Thanks for sharing and showing me how I could've made it even better.
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