Definitely my quickest Makeover Monday ever. Forgive me, I’m busy at the bar at the beach.

This week we looked at a rather funny dataset from FiveThirtyEight about how the media tries to avoid saying “groin” when someone in a sporting event gets hits where it hurts. They presented their work in this table:

There’s nothing particularly terrible about this other than a table of numbers makes comparisons more difficult than necessary. The summary on the right helps it make a bit more sense.

For my viz, I wanted to create a chart that I’ve never built - a treemap bar chart. Basically this is a way to view the distribution of the words by each media outlet but also summarize them in bar chart form so that you can see which media outlet ranks the highest.

Ironically enough, donut charts are basically pie charts with a hole in the middle, leaving you with even less information to fill your brain.

Donut charts are used to display data in rings, where each ring represents a data series.  Each ring is a distinct category.  Yes, there are examples of donuts within donuts (here is a particularly horrific example from Dundas). 

Once again, Nielsen provides another example to pick on review.  At least their consistent in their ineffectiveness, right?

Pie charts can be effective, rarely, but I don’t see why you would ever use a donut chart over a pie chart.  Let’s look at some alternatives to Nielsen’s infographic.

Alternative 1 – Pie Chart

Grade = F

1. It’s a pie chart
2. It’s a pie chart
3. It’s a pie chart

Alternative 2 – Bar chart by Device by Category

Grade = C

1. Comparisons between Devices is difficult
2. Data is sorted by frequency of using the Device, making it harder to see the winners and losers
3. The coloring by Category is distracting

Alternative 3 – Bar chart by Category by Device

Grade = B

1. Easy to compare devices, which was the point of the article
2. Labels removed since the exact values are not all that important and distract from comparing the size of the bars
3. Devices are sorted by frequency within each Category, making it easy to see the winners and losers in each Category
4. The colors neatly segment the data

Alternative 4 – Heat Map

Grade = A

1. Easy to compare all of the data at once, whether you want to look vertically, horizontally or both. 
2. A heat map makes it clear that people use their computers at home to watch video most frequently and that people watch a LOT of video, independent of the device.
3. The colors are impactful and provide rich meaning, while not overwhelming your eyes.

Alternative 5 – Highlight Table

Grade = A+

1. You get all of the benefits of the heat map, but you also get the values, providing additional detail.

These are only five of the many possible alternatives.  Download the Tableau workbook here.

Would you use any of these charts to visualize this data?  Why or why not?  What other alternatives would you find effective?

The chart below comes from a recently released study by Nielsen.  With some simple fixes, this data can communicate much more effectively.

I find this chart hard to read and interpret because:

1. The data is not aligned vertically, making comparisons across categories for the same country difficult.  For example, your eyes are constantly pinging left to right to left trying to compare the UK values.  It kind of makes me feel like I’m in a tennis match.
2. The bubbles are not sized according to their percentage, making comparing bubble sizes meaningless and inaccurate.  You can’t tell me that the orange Italy bubble for Downloaded Music is 1/3 the size of the US bubble.
3. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to the order of the categories.  At first I thought they were sized by the US percentages, but that’s not it.  Maybe they’re ordered by the total?  Nope.  I have no idea!

There are two better alternatives for presenting this data.  First, if you like the bubbles, then a viz like this works. 

With this viz, it’s so much easier to compare values both across and down.  It’s easier to compare bubble sizes, you don’t have to lookup the colors since they’re organized in columns, and the bubble sizes are relative to each other.  Look at Downloaded Music in Italy now: 20% now looks like it’s a bit less than 1/3 the size of the US bubble (62%).

Note that I would normally have ordered the categories alphabetically, but I sorted them in the same order as the Nielsen viz so that you could compare the mine and their’s more easily.

A second alternative would be a simple bar chart like this.

This chart also addresses the comparison problems.  The gridlines make it especially easy to compare categories within the same country, though your eyes do have to skip over three other bars before getting to the next one.

Bar lengths are much, much easier to compare than bubble sizes, but the bar chart feels a bit more cluttered to me than the bubble chart.  In this situation, I would use the bubble chart I created. 

This goes to show that there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

The New York Times ran an article written by A.O. Scott back in November. The purpose is not to critique the article, but rather the, gasp, bubble chart used to rank media consumption hours.



I'm a big fan of Stephen Few and have learned a lot from Stephen and his books about effective visual design. Stephen point out that "Visual perception in humans has not evolved to support the comparison of 2-D areas, except as rough approximations that are far from accurate."

As soon as I saw this ranked bubble chart, I immediately began exploring other, more effective display mediums. Here are some examples.

I wanted to start by trying to find a way to use the bubble charts. The only method I could employ was to add color to the bubble charts, but I don't gain much at all.



Of course, the simplest way to rank data is through a simple bar chart. The first example is as intuitive as it gets; it's very easy to compare the relative size of the bars. The only purpose of this graph is to emphasize the rank.



I took this a step further. When reviewing Scott's bubble chart, I had the impression that he was emphasizing the percentage of time that we spend in each of the different medium. That led me to a bar chart that shows the contribution to the total. It's the same graphic as the ranking chart above, but this time I intentionally labelled the bars to emphasize the contribution of each activity.



I'll conclude with one of the least effective displays, the dreaded pie chart, but I think one of the pie charts is actually a bit effective. The first pie chart displays every category, which makes it impossible to compare the sizes and has way too much information.



I decided to group all but the top two categories into an "other" category to simplify the pie chart and I also ensured that they were ranked by contribution as you made your way around the pie.



Which display do you like best? Which display is most effective? My vote is for the bar chart displaying the contribution to the total.