Monday, October 13, 2014

Never judge a visualization by its bubbles

This morning, while browsing the news in my RSS reader, I stumbled upon this horror in the Dadaviz website.

I was about to label it as another egregious example of data decoration, but then I visited the website where it was published, and discovered that the graphic isn't that bad, after all. OK, it's done in Flash (we're in 2014, people!) but notice the many ways you can navigate the data. Using the buttons below the charts, you can toggle between the useless bubbles and an honest and readable bar chart, and you can filter by age, gender, region etc. Moreover, the graphic includes a thorough Sources section. Never judge a book by its cover!