That's a wrap. Watch Me Viz has retired, for good. 

This week's data was about the performance of all of the WMV livestreams. There was some incredible viewer participation, which ultimately led to this viz that explains why WMV should quietly disappear.

Check out the livestream below.

Makeover Monday is back! Every Monday I'll be running a #WatchMeViz and every Wednesday, Eva will be running #VizReview. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for reminders of the latest events.

https://youtube.com/andykriebel

This week was a makeover of a visualization by Visual Capitalist about the top 10 military spenders. During Watch Me Viz, I iterated through 15 different charts before settling on a bump chart. If you want to learn about sets, parameters, table calculations, containers and more, watch the video below.

Below the video you can see my viz, or click here. Enjoy! If you need clarifications on anything, please comment on the video here.

What could be improved?

Final Dashboard (click to interact)

Week 39 brought another #Viz5 topic, this time it was about children that are now 20-24 who were married under the age of 18. Child marriage is, of course, horrific and it's a violation of human rights. Unicef has done an excellent job of recapping all of the issues and why these marriages happen on their website here.

As I've mentioned before, I ALWAYS find these Viz5 data sets tought. I'm not sure why; perhaps I have a mental block on them now. This week the data set was three columns: country, female %, and male %. That can't be too tough...right?

Well, I sure made it tough. First, I joined the data to regional mappings from Unicef so that I could possibly look at the data at the regional level; I decided to use medians for each region in the end. Then I went into Tableau and built a bunch of charts to explore the data. I used chart guides to help me think through options and none of them seemed to make any particularly interesting insights pop out.

After about two hours of nothing, I got the idea of simply looking at the % of females that were married under the age of 18. I ended up with a simple bar chart, which turned out to not be too far from the first chart I created a few minutes in.

Here's the #WatchMeViz video and below is the visualization. Thanks to those that watched live and contributed ideas along the way!! It really helps knowing others are there encouraging me.

• Tables are great for looking up specific values. Want to know how many views and/or subscribers the 73rd highest channel has? A table makes finding that really easy.
• Tables are precise; they provide exact values.
• The table is sorted by the rank, making it easy to process who is most popular.

This week’s Makeover Monday was considerably “easier” than last week’s in that the data set was only nine data points and was really just a simple makeover of a bad chart choice. As David Pires noted, it might seem like I pick on Business Insider; I can assure you I’m not doing so intentionally. They simple provide simple example that work well for this project. Their fault, not mine.

In researching this makeover, I ran across this article from Walter Hickey, also of Business Insider, titled “The Worst Chart In The World”. In the article, which I encourage you to read, Walter walks through the pretty typical reasons for why pie charts are bad choices. Much of the same argument can be applied to this week’s donut chart, which is basically a pie chart with a whole in it, making it arguably even worse than a pie chart for comparing parts to a whole.

Given the article Walter wrote, it’s a shame to see his ideas not permeating across Business Insider. Any ideas on how we can help him spread the good word about data visualisation?

This week I wanted to apply the simple step-by-step approach to the makeover that I’ve used in the past. The idea was sparked by this article by Darkhorse Analytics. Emily Kund has also told me in the past that she really likes when I apply this step-by-step method to my makeovers because she thinks it’s a better learning experience. The charts I makeover don’t always fit this recipe, but I’ll do my best to use this approach when possible.
So flip through the story points one at a time and watch the makeover unfold. Enjoy!