Unintentional deception of area expansion #bigdata #piechart

Someone sent me this chart via Twitter, as an example of yet another terrible pie chart. (I couldn't find that tweet anymore but thank you to the reader for submitting this.)

At first glance, this looks like a pie chart with the radius as a second dimension. But that is the wrong interpretation.

In a pie chart, we typically encode the data in the angles of the pie sectors, or equivalently, the areas of the sectors. In this special case, the angle is invariant across the slices, and the data are encoded in the radius.

Since the data are found in the radii, let's deconstruct this chart by reducing each sector to its left-side edge.

This leads to a different interpretation of the chart: it’s actually a simple bar chart, manipulated.

The process of the manipulation runs against what data visualization should be. It takes the bar chart (bottom right) that is easy to read, introduces slants so it becomes harder to digest (top right), and finally absorbs a distortion to go from inefficient to incompetent (left).

What is this distortion I just mentioned? When readers look at the original chart, they are not focusing on the left-side edge of each sector but they are seeing the area of each sector. The ratio of areas is not the same as the ratio of lengths. Adding purple areas to the chart seems harmless but in fact, despite applying the same angles, the designer added disproportionately more area to the larger data points compared to the smaller ones.

 

In order to remedy this situation, the designer has to take the square root of the lengths of the edges. But of course, the simple bar chart is more effective.

 

 

Comments

[Nigel Bruin]

Fixed center angle with data encoded as area (/radius) = Coxcomb chart.

[Evinton Antonio Cordoba Mosquera]

Great point of view. I think, the first phase is to understand what we need to answer by using visualization technique. People always miss to select a proper visualization.