Can a picture of a nude person improve your decision-making processes? (Please don’t say “yeaaaaah”.) Probably not, but if you need a good attention grabber a picture of a naked b0dy is your best bet. Make sure you’ll add one to your next sales report. Because, if you are using those glossy 3D pie charts … Read more
According to Stephen Few, the founders of Tableau Software made some assumptions about visual analytics’ adoption that we can summarize in a single sentence: analysts want to find hidden insights in large and complex data sets using new visual paradigms. Later on, they discovered that these assumptions were somewhat flawed, and that what people really … Read more
Many misconceptions plague the field on information visualization. This post lists some of them and tells you how to remove those misconceptions.
You can add silly 3D effects to a pie chart, you can explode all the slices, you can compare multiple pie charts, you can use a legend instead of labeling the slices directly. This will probably render your graph useless, and make you look kind of dumb, but it is not the end of the … Read more
I really dislike stacked bar charts… Let’s see a new bad example. Steve Rubel shares with us how he spent his time online (update: page no longer available) over the last two weeks. He uses the Firefox add-on PageAddict to monitor the time. He writes: As you can see almost all of my time online … Read more
This article goes much against conventional wisdom about pie charts (and doughnut charts) by answering these two simple questions: Can we use a large number of categories in pie charts? (Yes, we can.) Can we make a productive use of the apparently useless doughnut chart? (Yes, we can.) Disclaimer (Sort of…) Let me start by … Read more
Loss aversion – wrong chart example JunkCharts writes an interesting post on how loss aversion can happen in chart-making. The general concept of loss aversion tells us that “people strongly prefer avoiding losses than acquiring gains”. Translated to chart-making, it means that there is a “tendency to avoid losing data at any cost”. “To clarify, … Read more
In what seems to be a post-vacation syndrome, I am in the mood for pie charts. I see them everywhere, even in car logos. Actually, I am more in the mood to defy current “crowd wisdom” about pie chats. Search the web for “pie chart” and you’ll get more than one million results, and a … Read more
Best Pie Chart Award (clean and balanced. Your perception may not be great at comparing angles, but who cares?) 2th Place (also nice, but too many slices, and I don’t like the title around the pie) Lateral Pie-Thinking Award (well, perhaps someone just messed up the template) Designer’s Pie Charts Award (data? … Read more
And so the first year went by. I’d like to thank everyone that reads and contributes to the blog. I learned a lot with you last year (and I hopefully I gave something back). Now, let’s see what the future brings.