Of course this chart isn’t the cause, but it did get me heated over its horrific design. 

I’m becoming convinced that Nielsen doesn’t particularly care about making good design decisions, and they apparently don’t particularly value my feedback either.  I can assure you, I’ve given them plenty.

Here’s an alternative that I threw together in Tableau. 

It’s important when creating a visualization that you design it in such a way that, amongst many other things, (1) the reader can see the whole story at a glance, and (2) they can interact for their own deeper analysis.  To accomplish this I:

1. Started with maps (This is a global report with geographic data, which always leads me to start with a map)
2. Made very specific color choices to emphasize the positives (blue) and the negatives (red)
3. Added interactivity through highlighting
4. Included a scatterplot to compare the change to the index
5. Provided the option to filter by continent

Why is all of this important?

Because we need to know how consumers’ feeling are trending; a country could have a high index, but are headed down (e.g. India and China), or a country could have a low index and things are looking up (e.g., South Korea and France).  Those are two very different stories.

Imagine how the politicians could spin this information.  Click on the USA and you’ll see (when you hover over the circle that gets highlighted) that the United States is in trouble.  Their CCI is 87 and it has declined –5 points.  Uh oh!

I challenge you to deduce any of that from Nielsen’s fan chart.

Nielsen released it’s quarterly consumer confidence index report today and their effort to produce a meaningful chart is much better this time.  You may recall I was critical of them earlier in the month.

This chart is clear and to the point.  Within seconds you can:

• See that there are approximately as many countries with an increase in consumer confidence as there are with a decrease
• Find your own country, see where it ranks and how it compares to the average

There are many well done aspects to this chart:

• The color choices for the bars makes them easily distinguishable
• The legend is out of the way, but easily referenced
• The title clearly indicates what you are reading
• The subtitle gives a super quick summary that gets right to the point

Well done Nielsen (thought you may want to remove the labels for each bar; they’re a bit distracting and make the bars look crowded).  I couldn’t go without one critique.