Monday, August 19, 2019

Smart interaction in visualization

I'm always happy to see good charts being produced by national statistical offices. Thanks to Xan Gregg I've discovered these interactive visualizations by Rob Fry's team at the UK Office for National Statistics. They are sequences of density plots of the ages of people who committed suicide every year.

As the annotation layer on the charts themselves point out, there were fewer suicides in the 90s than today or the 1980s, and they were more common among younger people. In later years the highest points of the curve move to the right, indicating an increase in suicides among middle-age people. My other favorite smart feature of this piece is that if you hover over any year, you can see each density plot without being obscured by other curves.