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October 20, 2014

Monday Makeover: Causes of Death in the USA

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Today, Tableau's Viz of the Day team chose this visualization from John Schoen of CNBC.  Click on the image to go to the interactive version.


One of my frustrations with Viz of the Day, as I've noted on both of my appearances on the Tableau Wannabe Podcast, is that I suspect people look at these as examples of visualizations done well, even though that's not the true intent. Yes, I'm saying that anecdotally, but I base this off of a few conversations I've had with people about it.

In today's viz, there are an abundance of issues.  Here are a few:
  1. The filled map makes it impossible to see the smaller states. In fact, it's nearly impossible to trigger the action when hovering over Rhode Island. Filled maps can easily skew the data towards the larger states, so a bubble map is preferred.
  2. The temperature diverging color palette for the map is not color-blind friendly. 
  3. The colors on the map and on the packaged bubbles are too similar.  Green on the map means a low rate, while green on the bubbles means cancer.
  4. The stacked bar chart in the middle adds no value. When you hover over a state, the packed bubbles changes, so what value is the stacked bar chart adding.
  5. Packed bubbles are a very poor way to communicate ranking. A sorted bar chart is better. 
Given these problems, I decided to give it a quick makeover today. I stayed within my one hour time limit that I generally set for these makeovers, so I realize there is probably more I could have done.

In my one hour, I attempted to address all of the issues I pointed out above.

  1. I changed the map to a bubble map. Now it's easier to see all states because I've also sized the states by the number of deaths for additional context.
  2. I'm using a blue-red color palette consistently throughout to represent the death rate.
  3. I removed the individual colors for the diseases and colored them by the death rate instead.
  4. I killed the stacked bar chart. I also included an action from the bar chart to the map (in addition to the existing map to bar chart action).
  5. I changed the packed bubbles to a ranked bar chart.
Simple changes that take very little time can often make for a much more pleasing visualization.

What else would you have done? Download the workbook here and give it a shot.

June 28, 2013

Chart of the Day Makeover: Samsung’s rocketing marketing expenses

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Chart of the Day recently published an article on Samsung’s Insane Marketing Budget whose primary purpose was to show how Samsung’s budget has increased over time.  The article also pushes the reader towards comparing Samsung to other companies included in the chart.  To do so, COTD presented this bar chart:

Before we makeover this bar chart, let’s examine it.

  1. It’s pretty straight forward to compare the years within a single company, but the emphasis is on time, which means a line chart should be the natural first choice.
  2. But wait.  The years are in reverse chronological order, so turn your head 90 degrees to the left and look at the chart.  Without referring to the legend, one would likely assume that the most recent year was at the bottom of each set of bars.
  3. The bars are colored by year, which makes the comparisons across companies for a given year possible, but not easy.  It’s easier to compare the years if they’re grouped together.
  4. Each bar uses gradient coloring and shadowing.  Why?  What value does this add? 
  5. They’re using red and green bars together.  They’re not thinking about the color-blind folks out there.  They should be using natural, color-blind friendly colors.

To address these issues, I’ve created the following viz using Tableau.  Download a free trial here.

With this viz, you can now see:

  1. The trend for each company.  It’s much easier to see the large increase in Samsung’s budget, while all of the others in the view are relatively flat.
  2. I thought it was important to emphasize the difference between Samsung and the other companies, thus the five small line charts, which all clearly show how much more Samsung is spending.

How would you do this differently?  Download the data here and the workbook here.

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