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.